Mahon, [John] Denis, Sir

Date born: 1910

Place born: London, United Kingdom

Date died:

Place died:

Collector and historian of Baroque art. Mahon was heir to the Guinness Mahon merchant banking fortune. His father was John FitzGerald Mahon (d. 1942) and his mother Lady Alice Evelyn Browne (d. 1970). After attending Eton, Mahon entered Christ Church, Oxford University, where he received an M.A. He began collecting art in 1934 when he spotted Guercino's Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph through a dealer's window in Paris in 1934. In the late 1930s he met the refugee art historian Otto Kurz (q.v.), a fellow enthusiast of the Italian Baroque. Mahon employed Kurz to translate Italian and traveled with him to the Soviet Union to study the Italian masters there. Among Mahon's other astute buys were Guido Reni's Rape of Europa, commissioned for the King of Poland in 1636, which Mahon purchased in 1945 at a Christie's auction. In 1947 he published Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, a series of essays promoting seventeenth-century Italian art. These nearly single-handedly served to change scholarly opinion on the era. In Bologna, Cesare Gnudi (q.v.) sponsored many exhibitions with Mahon, bringing these artists to a higher profile. He became a trustee of the National Gallery in 1956. At that time, the museum had not bought a major Italian Baroque painting for a century. Mahon disagreed publicly with the dating and chronology of early works of Poussin, exhibited in at the 1960 Louvre Poussin exhibition, but arranged by the other hihg-profile British Poussin scholar, Anthony Blunt (q.v.). This professional rivalry lasted throughout both their careers. As a trustee of the Galery, he weighed in publicly against the cleaning ("overcleaning") of Gallery paintings in the early 1960s, opposing others including Kurz and E. H. Gombrich (q.v.). Mahon received honorary doctorates from Newcastle in 1969, Oxford in 1994, Rome (La Sapienza) in 1998, and Bologna in 2002. In 1999, at age 89, he donated his vast collection to various public museums in the British Isles and Italy. His donations included: twenty-six works went to the National Gallery, London, five to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, six to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, eight to the National Gallery of Scotland, one to Temple Newsam in Leeds, 12 to the Ashmolean in Oxford, a number to the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin and the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.

Mahon was one of the few major collectors of art who was also a serious and respected scholar. As a collector, he was responsible, along with Sacheverell Sitwell (q.v.) and Tancred Borenius (q.v.), for bringing Italian Baroque painters to the attention of English-speaking collecting public and scholars. Between 1934 to the late 1960's Mahon collected Italian baroque pictures when few others did. "They were worth nothing in the Thirties ... for 30 years I had the field to myself," he once quipped. He was an exponent of admission-free art museums. His generally conservative methodology has been criticized by few. A celebrated methodological exchange occurred with Ann Sutherland Harris (q.v.) on documents concerning Poussin. His chronology for the early Poussin work, based largely upon connoisseurship, has generally been favored over his rivals.

Home Country: United Kingdom

Sources: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 4; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 435; Alberge, Dalya. "Art Galleries Revel in a Living Legacy." The Times (London) June 18, 1999, p. 24; People of Today. Debrett's Peerage Limited, 2003, p. 1318; Sutton, Denys. "Profile: Denis Mahon." Apollo 108 (October 1978): 266-7.

Bibliography: Studies in Seicento Art and Theory. London: Warburg Institute, 1947; and Emiliani, Andrea, and De Grazia, Diane, and Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. Guercino: Master Painter of the Baroque. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992; and Gnudi, Cesare. Il Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591-1666): Catalogo critico dei dipinti. [2nd corrected edition, exhibition at the Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio,Bologna]. Bologna: Alfa, 1968, 1st ed., 1967; I disegni del Guercino della collezione Mahon. Bologna: Edizioni Alfa, 1967; Poussiniana: Afterthoughts Arising from the Exhibition. New York: Gazette des beaux-arts, 1962; "Miscellanea for the Cleaning Controversy." Burlington Magazine 104, no. 716 (November 1962): 460-470; Mostra dei Carracci: disegni. Bologna: Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio/Edizioni Alfa, 1956; "Guercino and Cardinal Serra: a Newly Discovered Masterpiece." Apollo ns 114 (September 1981): 170-5; "Guercino as a Portraitist and his Pope Gregory XV." Apollo 113 (April 1981): 230-5; "Poussin and his Patrons" [reply to Ann Sutherland Harris' review of Friedlaender festschrift]. Burlington Magazine 109 (May 1967): 304 ff., [reply by Ann Sutherland Harris, p. 308].