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Eric Maclagan (1879–1951)

Eric Maclagan (1879–1951)

Sir Eric Robert Dalrymple Maclagan was an art historian, curator, and museum director who joined the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum after studying classics at Oxford. He began in the Department of Textiles, then moved to the Department of Architecture and Sculpture, where he produced various publications on the museum’s holdings of medieval and Renaissance art. An amateur poet, he introduced William Butler Yeats to sources about the Byzantine imperial palace. He toured Venice to see its Byzantine art with Elisina Tyler and Royall Tyler in 1910. During the First World War, Maclagan was posted to Paris, where he met Mildred Barnes Bliss, Robert Woods Bliss, and Edith Wharton. Returning to the Victoria and Albert Museum after the war, he became its director in 1924.

 

Dictionary of Art Historians, s.v. "Maclagan, Eric [Robert Dalrymple], Sir."

Robert S. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 132, 162.

"Obituary of Sir Eric Maclagan KCVO, CBE," The Times, September 17, 1951.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. "Maclagan, Sir Eric Robert Dalrymple (1879–1951)," by Trenchard Cox.