Francis Haskell was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 art historian, whose writings placed emphasis on the social history

Social history

Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...

 of art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

.

He read history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

 at King's College, Cambridge

King's College, Cambridge

King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college's full name is "The King's College of our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge", but it is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the University....

 and became a Fellow there in 1954. Later he was Professor of Art History

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

 at Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

 from 1967 until his retirement in 1995; the position made him, ex officio a Visitor— that is, a trustee— of the Ashmolean Museum

Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean Museum on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is the world's first university museum...

. He was a trustee of the Wallace Collection

Wallace Collection

The Wallace Collection is a museum in London, with a world-famous range of fine and decorative arts from the 15th to the 19th centuries with large holdings of French 18th-century paintings, furniture, arms & armour, porcelain and Old Master paintings arranged into 25 galleries.It was established in...

, 1976—1997. In 1976 Haskell, who often served on advisory committees for museum loan exhibitions, joined the National Art Collections Fund

National Art Collections Fund

The Art Fund is an independent membership-based British charity, which raises funds to aid the acquisition of artworks for the nation. It gives grants and acts as a channel for many gifts and bequests, as well as lobbying on behalf of museums and galleries and their users...

 committee and became one of its most vocal members, defending the purchase of Poussin

Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century...

's Rebecca and Eliezar for the Fitzwilliam Museum

Fitzwilliam Museum

The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge, located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge, England. It receives around 300,000 visitors annually. Admission is free....

 in Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

 (the government refused to accept the painting because it had been in the collection of the disgraced Anthony Blunt

Anthony Blunt

Anthony Frederick Blunt , was a British art historian who was exposed as a Soviet spy late in his life.Blunt was Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Surveyor of the King's Pictures and London...

).

His interest in the circumstances in which paintings were displayed, which reflected the esteem in which they were held and influenced the way they were perceived runs as a leitmotiv through his published work, beginning with an article jointly written with Michael Levey

Michael Levey

Sir Michael Vincent Levey, LVO was a British art historian and was director of the National Gallery for thirteen years, from 1973 to 1986.-Biography:...

 in Arte Veneta, 1958, that was devoted to art exhibitions in eighteenth-century Venice.

His wife, Larissa, had been a curator at the Hermitage Museum

Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums of the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been opened to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display,...

.

Selected bibliography

• Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy 1962, 2nd edition, 1980. Haskell was working on a further revised edition when he died.
• Rediscoveries in Art: some aspects of taste, fashion, and Collecting in England and France 1976
• Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Antique Sculpture 1500—1900 1981, with Nicholas Penny
  Nicholas Penny
  Nicholas Penny, FSA is a British art historian. Since Spring 2008 he has been director of the National Gallery in London....
  
  
• History and its Images: art and the interpretation of the past (Yale University Press) 1993
• The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master paintings and the rise of the art exhibition, (Yale University Press) 2000