Dell, Robert [Edward]

Date born:  1865

Place Born:  

Date died:  1940

Place died:  New York, NY

First editor of the Burlington Magazine 1903-1906; political journalist. Dell was editor of the Connoisseur magazine, a British art journal describing itself as for collectors.  In 1903 Dell helped found and became first editor of the Burlington Magazine.  The intent was to produce a British art journal for the serious art scholar, based upon the models of connoisseurship.  From the first, the magazine lost money.  Later the same year, he was joined as co-editor by Holmes (q.v.).  Holmes' experience in publishing and printing put the magazine on secure footing.  Part of this was the quality "Consultative Committee" Dell put together, whose members included Viscount Dillon, David Lindsay [Lord Balcarres] (q.v.), Sir Edward Thompson, Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke (q.v.), Sidney Colvin, Charles Eliot Norton (q.v.), Charles Holroyd (q.v.), Salomon Reinach (q.v.), Laurence Binyon (q.v.) and Wilhelm von Bode (q.v.). Dell hired Edgerton Beck, (d. 1941) a later costume historian, as his assistant. In 1906 Dell resigned, moving to Paris to be the foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian.  After World War I he was expelled from the Clemenceau government for articles criticizing France's attempts at a 1917 peace negotiations with Austria.  After the War, he worked for the Nation as a correspondent as well. Dell wrote a book on his experiences with the French, My Second Country, in 1920.  His expulsion to France was rescinded in 1926 and he returned briefly. He moved to New York in 1938, residing at the Hotel Brevoort where he died in 1940.

Dell and the Burlington Magazine were the center of the squabbles that took place among British authorities of Italian Renaissance.  Fry's usurping of the magazine was in part to consolidate his opinions on Quattrocento art.  Dell sided with R. Langton Douglas (q.v.) and Sanford Arthur Strong (q.v.), a camp opposed to the opinions of Bernard Berenson (q.v.) and Fry.

Home Country:  United Kingdom

Sources: "To the Readers of the Burlington Magazine." Burlington Magazine 10, no. 43 (Oct., 1906): 6;  Current Biography Yearbook. 1940 edition. New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1940; Samuels, Ernst.  Bernard Berenson:  The Making of a Connoisseur.  Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979, pp. 390-1; Leahy, Helen Rees.  "The Burlington Magazine, 1903-1911."  in, Mansfield, Elizabeth, ed.  Art History and its Institutions:  Foundations of a Discipline.  New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 232-234;  [obituary:] "Mr. Robert Dell." Burlington Magazine 77, no. 449. (August 1940): 67; "Robert Dell Dies, A British Writer." New York Times July 21, 1940, p. 29.

Bibliography:  "A Tudor Manor House: Sutton Place by Guildford." Burlington Magazine 7, no. 28 (Jul., 1905): 289-301; Introduction. Catalogue of an Exhibition of the Work of Modern French Artists. Brighton, England: Public Art Galleries, Brighton, 1910; My Second Country. London: John Lane, 1920.