Brinsley Ford

Sir Richard Brinsley Ford CBE (10 June 1908 – 4 May 1999) was a British art historian, scholar, and collector.

Ford was the director of the Burlington Magazine, president of Walpole Society and chaired the National Art Collections Fund.

His maternal grandmother left him a legacy two years later with which Ford was able to begin collecting art, including the works of Fuseli, Michelangelo, Ingres, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henry Moore.

[1] During the war years the Burlington Magazine floundered but Ford rallied support and himself provided financial assistance to the journal.

[1] Interested in men who had made the grand tour to Italy, Ford began accumulating information for a dictionary in the 1950s.

The archive includes research notes, correspondence, transcriptions and copies of original sources, photocopies of published material, publications and photographs.

[7] In 2008, the family of the late Sir Brinsley Ford donated approximately 250 exhibition catalogues on 20th-century artists and on the subject of the Grand Tour to the Paul Mellon Centre library.

[8] Benjamin Booth, Brinsley's ancestor, began collecting works of art in the 18th century, most notably the bulk of Richard Wilson's English landscapes.

[4] The Brinsley Ford estate sold a drawing of what became Michelangelo's Cristo della Minerva statue, through Christie's, to a German art dealer for $12,378,500.

The drawing, purchased by Ford in 1936, was used as inspiration for the statue located at the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome that was commissioned in 1514.

[9] In 1936, Ford was criticised for spending about 3,000 guineas for a drawing of Michelangelo's; his aunt felt it was extravagant since he paid about what it would cost for a home at that time.