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Sir Edwin Alfred Grenville Manton (22 January 1909 – 1 October 2005) was an English art collector. He was a driving force in the creation of the American International Group (AIG), a collector of paintings by John Constable and his contemporaries, and a generous benefactor to the arts, the church and medicine.
Knighted in 1994 for charitable services to the Tate Gallery he was, after Sir Henry Tate, the most generous benefactor in its history and continued to involve himself in the affairs of the gallery well into his 90s.
Sir Edwin was born in Earls Colne, Essex, 20 miles from Constable's birthplace. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Westcliff-on-Sea on the Thames estuary, a location that gave him a lifelong affection for expanses of water and sky and which he much later recalled by acquiring paintings of the area by the English painter John Wonnacott.
However, during the first world war the family moved to Shaftesbury in Dorset. There he eventually enrolled at Shaftesbury Grammar School where he stayed on as a boarder, even after the family had moved to London.
In 1926, he declined a scholarship to Cambridge, instead following an uncle's introduction to the Paris agent of the Caledonian Insurance Company. In 1933, he was offered a post in New York. He joined as a casualty underwriter with the then small American International Underwriter Group, later the AIG, one of a number of companies established by Cornelius Vander Starr.
Soon afterwards, he married an American, Florence Brewer, known to all as Gretchen and they later had a daughter Diana. In 1939, he returned to London and volunteered for service, but was rejected on medical grounds having suffered from Stokes-Adams disease.
He became president of the American International Underwriters' Corporation in 1942. He served as president of AIU from 1942 to 1969. He took over the chairmanship of AIU in 1969, retiring officially in 1975. At his death, he was an honorary director of and senior advisor to AIG. During his most influential years, the company grew to a force of more than 50,000 people and Manton became a leading figure in the American insurance business.
His shareholding in AIG made him very wealthy and he was ranked as the 83rd richest person in the United Kingdom according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2003. [1]
After the second world war, he began to collect British paintings. His particular enthusiasm was for Constable. During the 1960s and 1970s, he assembled one of the best collections in private hands, in spite of competition from Paul Mellon among others.
During this period, Constable scholars began to distinguish more rigorously between the works of John Constable, his son Lionel, and followers. In the early 1980s, Manton came to know Leslie Parris, deputy keeper of the British Collection at the Tate, who, together with Ian Fleming-Williams and Graham Reynolds, were the leading authorities in the field. Manton discovered many of the works in his collection were what he called Constabiles, rather than works by the master, but Manton took this to be part of the learning process and became close friends with Parris in particular.
His friendship with Parris resulted in the offer of a contribution to the Tate's 1987 appeal for funds to acquire Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows [2] , and shortly afterwards a gift of AIG shares, which established the American Fund for the Tate Gallery with an endowment of $6.5m in 1988.
Manton never took up US citizenship, retaining his British nationality until his death. In 1997, he established the American Fund for the Tate Gallery with an endowment generated by a gift of AIG shares. In creating a fund that would respond to the Tate's wish to strengthen its American collection, he was giving expression both to his affection for his birthplace and to his enthusiasm for his adopted country.
By 2005, the fund was worth $30m, and made possible the acquisition of major works by Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Donald Judd, David Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, Bruce Nauman and Cildo Meireles. Manton deliberately established the fund in a form that would allow American citizens to make donations which would support the mission of the Tate and this has stimulated very significant gifts of works of art and more than $70m in donations.
In 1992 and 1997, Manton made further gifts totalling nearly £12m towards the centenary development and other projects at Tate Britain; he also made a promised bequest of a major Constable, The Glebe Farm. These magnificent gifts allowed the trustees to transform the presentation of British art at Millbank as Tate Britain, in 2001. Taken together, Manton's benefactions, enhancing both the British and international collections, are by far the most generous gift in the history of the Tate.
Manton also was a longtime parishioner at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in New York City. After his death, the Manton Foundation supported the construction of a new pipe organ in memory of Sir Edwin and Lady Manton. The 6,183-pipe, 95-stop Manton Memorial Organ was the first French-built pipe organ in New York City and was installed in 2011.
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
John Constable was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home – now known as "Constable Country" – which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
Dulwich Picture Gallery is an art gallery in Dulwich, south London. It opened to the public in 1817 and was designed by the Regency architect Sir John Soane. His design was recognized for its innovative and influential method of illumination for viewing the art. It is the oldest public art gallery in England and was made an independent charitable trust in 1994. Until then, the gallery was part of the College of God's Gift, a charitable foundation established by the actor, entrepreneur and philanthropist Edward Alleyn in the early 17th century. The acquisition of artworks by its founders and bequests from its many patrons resulted in Dulwich Picture Gallery housing one of the country's finest collections of Old Masters, especially rich in French, Italian and Spanish Baroque paintings, and in British portraits from the Tudor era to the 19th century.
The Hay Wain – originally titled Landscape: Noon – is a painting by John Constable, completed in 1821, which depicts a rural scene on the River Stour between the English counties of Suffolk and Essex. It hangs in the National Gallery in London and is regarded as "Constable's most famous image" and one of the greatest and most popular English paintings.
Paul Mellon was an American philanthropist and an owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses. He is one of only five people ever designated an "Exemplar of Racing" by the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. He was co-heir to one of America's greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank created by his grandfather Thomas Mellon, his father Andrew W. Mellon, and his father's brother Richard B. Mellon. In 1957, when Fortune prepared its first list of the wealthiest Americans, it estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce, and his cousins Sarah Mellon and Richard King Mellon, were all among the richest eight people in the United States, with fortunes of between US$400 and 700 million each.
The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is a museum in Canonbury Square in the district of Islington on the northern fringes of central London. It is the United Kingdom's only gallery devoted to modern Italian art and is a registered charity under English law.
Frederick Richard Lee was an English artist.
Martin J. Sullivan, OBE,, is the former deputy chairman of Willis Group Holdings plc and chairman and CEO of its, Willis Global Solutions, which oversees brokerage and risk management advisory services for Willis's multinational and global accounts. He also previously served as president and chief executive officer of American International Group, Inc.
Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows was painted by John Constable in 1831, three years after the death of his wife, Maria. It is currently on display in London, at Tate Britain, in the Clore gallery. He later added nine lines from The Seasons by the eighteenth-century poet James Thomson that reveal the painting's meaning: that the rainbow is a symbol of hope after a storm that follows on the death of the young Amelia in the arms of her lover Celadon. Constable exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1831, but continued working on it during 1833 and 1834. The art historians Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams have described the painting as the climax of his artistic career.
Edwin John Victor Pasmore, CH, CBE was a British artist. He pioneered the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.
Cornelius Vander Starr, sometimes known as Neil Starr, was an American businessman and founder of C.V. Starr & Co. in Shanghai, China, which became insurance giant AIG.
Earls Colne is a village in Essex, England named after the River Colne, on which it stands, and the Earls of Oxford who held the manor of Earls Colne from before 1086 to 1703.
Simon David Davan Sainsbury was a British businessman, philanthropist and art collector.
Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in England, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Founded by Sir Henry Tate, it houses a substantial collection of the art of the United Kingdom since Tudor times, and in particular has large holdings of the works of J. M. W. Turner, who bequeathed all his own collection to the nation. It is one of the largest museums in the country. The museum had 525,144 visitors in 2021, an increase of 34 percent from 2020 but still well below pre- COVID-19 pandemic levels. In 2021 it ranked 50th on the list of most-visited art museums in the world.
Sir Norman Robert Reid was an arts administrator and painter. He served as the Director of the Tate Gallery from 1964 to 1979.
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Hadleigh Castle is an oil painting by the English painter John Constable, created in 1829.
Wivenhoe Park is a painting of an English landscape park, the estate of the Rebow family, by the English Romantic painter, John Constable (1776–1837).
The Vale of Dedham is an 1828 oil painting by the English painter John Constable which depicts Dedham Vale on the Essex-Suffolk border in eastern England. It is in the permanent collection of the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
Henry Vaughan was a British art collector. He is best known for his many generous gifts and bequests to British and Irish public collections.