Robert Witt (art historian)

Sir Robert Clermont Witt CBE FSA (16 January 1872 – 26 March 1952) was a British art historian, who, along with Samuel Courtauld and Lord Lee of Fareham, was a co-founder of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

[1] Witt was born in Camberwell, south London, in 1872, the son of German parents Gustavus Andreas Witt, a merchant born in Hamburg, and Friederike Helene Von Clermont, from Frankfurt.

In 1899, he married Mary Helene Marten, a fellow Oxford student who, like him, collected photographs and reproductions of works of art.

Their joint collection, eventually surpassing 500,000 items, was housed in their home at 32 Portman Square, London.

[5][6] The Witt Library, as the couple referred to it, was the world's largest archive of reproductions of paintings and drawings, and turned their home into an international study center for scholars of art history.