Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England.
25 Facts About Nikolaus Pevsner
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Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig, Saxony, the son of Anna and her husband Hugo Pevsner, a Russian-Jewish fur merchant.
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Nikolaus Pevsner attended St Thomas School, Leipzig, and went on to study at several universities, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt am Main, before being awarded a doctorate by Leipzig in 1924 for a thesis on the Baroque architecture of Leipzig.
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Nikolaus Pevsner worked as an assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery between 1924 and 1928.
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Nikolaus Pevsner converted from Judaism to Lutheranism early in his life.
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Nikolaus Pevsner taught at the University of Gottingen between 1929 and 1933, offering a specialist course on English art and architecture.
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Nikolaus Pevsner's first post was an 18-month research fellowship at the University of Birmingham, found for him by friends in Birmingham and partly funded by the Academic Assistance Council.
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Nikolaus Pevsner was employed as a buyer of modern textiles, glass and ceramics for the Gordon Russell furniture showrooms in London.
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Nikolaus Pevsner was "more German than the Germans" to the extent that he supported "Goebbels in his drive for 'pure' non-decadent German art".
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In 1940, Nikolaus Pevsner was taken to the internment camp at Huyton, Liverpool as an enemy alien.
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Nikolaus Pevsner spent some time in the months after the Blitz clearing bomb debris, and wrote reviews and art criticism for the Ministry of Information's Die Zeitung, an anti-Nazi publication for Germans living in England.
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Nikolaus Pevsner completed for Penguin Books the Pelican paperback An Outline of European Architecture, which he had begun to develop while in internment.
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Nikolaus Pevsner was closely involved with the Reviews proprietor, H de C Hastings, in evolving the magazine's theories on picturesque planning.
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In 1942, Nikolaus Pevsner was appointed a part-time lecturer at Birkbeck College, London; he would eventually retire from the college in 1969 as its first Professor of Art History.
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Nikolaus Pevsner lectured at Cambridge University for almost 30 years, having been Slade Professor of Fine Art there for a record six years from 1949 to 1955, and was the Slade Professor at Oxford in 1968.
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Nikolaus Pevsner wrote 32 of the books himself and 10 with collaborators, with a further four of the original series written by others.
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In 1946, Nikolaus Pevsner made the first of several broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme, presenting nine talks in all up to 1950, examining painters and European art eras.
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Nikolaus Pevsner was a founding member in 1957 of the Victorian Society, the national charity for the study and protection of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and other arts.
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Nikolaus Pevsner served for ten years as a member of the National Advisory Council on Art Education, campaigning for art history to be a compulsory element in the curriculum of art schools.
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Nikolaus Pevsner was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1965 and awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1967.
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Nikolaus Pevsner received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1975.
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Nikolaus Pevsner died at home in Wildwood Terrace, Hampstead, London, in August 1983.
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Nikolaus Pevsner is buried in the churchyard of the Church of St Peter, Clyffe Pypard, in Wiltshire, where he and his wife Lola had a cottage.
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Nikolaus Pevsner's elder son, Dieter, was an editor at Penguin Books and co-founder with Oliver Caldecott of the publishing company Wildwood House in the 1970s.
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Nikolaus Pevsner's younger son, Tom, was a film producer and director who went on to work on several James Bond films.