Sir Richard Brinsley Ford was a British art historian, scholar, and collector.
25 Facts About Brinsley Ford
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Brinsley Ford inherited a large collection of art from his family and was himself an avid collector.
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Richard Brinsley Ford was born in 1908 in Petworth, Sussex to Captain Richard Ford and Rosamund Isabel Ramsden.
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Brinsley Ford's father was an officer for the British Army, who inherited in 1917 a large art collection that had been assembled by his great great grandfather, Richard Ford and his maternal great-grandfather, Benjamin Booth.
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Brinsley Ford then studied modern history at Trinity College, Oxford and graduated in 1930.
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In 1937 Brinsley Ford married a distant cousin, Joan Mary Vyvyan who was born in 1910.
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Brinsley Ford died of a heart attack at his home in London on 4 May 1999.
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Brinsley Ford met art connoisseur James Byam Shaw and artist Charles Barrow Prescott when he joined the Burlington Fine Arts Club.
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Brinsley Ford's father died in 1940 and the following year he took possession of his father's art collection.
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In 1939, before World War II began, Brinsley Ford became Troop Sergeant-Major in the Royal Artillery of the British Army.
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Brinsley Ford was transferred to MI9 military intelligence in 1941 and later headed the Brussels office.
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Brinsley Ford amassed an art collection that was held at his house at Wyndham Place.
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Brinsley Ford added works by Batoni, Cozza, Cavallino, creating a collection of Italian seicento and settecento works.
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Brinsley Ford became a member of the National Art Collections Fund executive committee in 1974 and its chair in 1975.
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Brinsley Ford organised an exhibition, "Richard Ford in Spain", lent works and assisted Denys Sutton in the development of the exhibition catalog.
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Interested in men who had made the grand tour to Italy, Brinsley Ford began accumulating information for a dictionary in the 1950s.
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In 2008, the family of the late Sir Brinsley Ford donated approximately 250 exhibition catalogues on 20th-century artists and on the subject of the Grand Tour to the Paul Mellon Centre library.
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Benjamin Booth, Brinsley Ford's ancestor, began collecting works of art in the 18th century, most notably the bulk of Richard Wilson's English landscapes.
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Brinsley Ford added paintings, sculptures and ceramics to the collection.
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Brinsley Ford has works of students of the Royal Academy of Arts that line the walls of his bedroom, from floor to ceiling.
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Brinsley Ford enjoyed the tours he gave of the collection at his Wyndham Place house.
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Brinsley Ford provided background stories about his collection, given with "the measured cadences of Edward Gibbon with the humorous sparkle of Horace Walpole" as he took visitors through rooms that held collection items.
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The Brinsley Ford estate sold a drawing of what became Michelangelo's Cristo della Minerva statue, through Christie's, to a German art dealer for $12,378,500.
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In 1936, Brinsley Ford was criticised for spending about 3,000 guineas for a drawing of Michelangelo's; his aunt felt it was extravagant since he paid about what it would cost for a home at that time.
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That story was often one of the tidbits that Brinsley Ford shared on his tours with visitors.