Philip Hendy

Sir Philip Anstiss Hendy (27 September 1900 – 6 September 1980) was a British art curator who worked both in Britain and overseas, notably the United States. In 1923 he began his career in art administration as an Assistant Keeper and lecturer at the Wallace Collection in London, despite his having no formal training in art history. His entries for the Wallace Collection's new catalogue and articles for The Burlington Magazine so impressed the administration of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts that the trustees of the museum agreed to fund Hendy's three-year stay in Italy, during which he compiled the Gardner catalogue.

From the Gardner Museum Hendy went on to curate the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1930, where he spent his budget of $10,000 on works by modern European masters including Georges Braque, Gino Severini and Walter Sickert. In 1933 Hendy resigned from the Museum of Fine Arts after a quarrel with the trustees who disapproved of his purchase of Matisse's 1903 nude Carmelina. Returning to Britain, he was appointed director of the Leeds City Art Gallery in 1934.

The threat posed to Leeds during the Second World War caused the gallery's works of art to be evacuated to a more rural setting in Temple Newsam House. The task of relocation, and the subsequent rehanging of the paintings in their new 18th-century surroundings, was undertaken by Hendy, whose work there caught the attention of the Director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark. Clark, who had similarly overseen the removal of the National Gallery pictures to safety in a North Wales quarry during the war years, appointed Hendy as his successor in 1946.

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