Ellis Waterhouse

Who was Ellis Waterhouse?

Sir Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse was an English art historian who specialized in Roman baroque and English painting. He was Director of the National Galleries of Scotland and held the Barber chair at Birmingham University until his official retirement in 1970.

Waterhouse was the son of the architect Percy Leslie Waterhouse, through whom he possessed the means to pursue a largely independent career. His fellow student at Marlborough College was Anthony Blunt, with whom he continued a lifelong professional friendship; he went on to New College, Oxford. In 1927–29 he studied at Princeton University with Frank Jewett Mather and received a fellowship to study El Greco in Spain. He returned to London to take up an Assistant Keeper's post at the National Gallery, London, under its Keepers, C. H. Collins Baker and H. Isherwood Kay.

He then joined the British School in Rome as librarian until 1936, working on the combination of connoisseurship and archival material that resulted in Roman Baroque Painting, on the strength of which he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and prepared the catalog for a Royal Academy exhibition, 17th-Century Art in Europe.