Frits Lugt Letters (VMF105), 1918-1922 | MSS Manuscripts

Lugt, Frits (1884-1970)

Frederik Johannes "Frits" Lugt (May 4, 1884 – July 15, 1970) was a self-taught collector and connoisseur of Netherlandish drawings and prints and a selfless and tireless compiler of essential reference tools documenting Northern European prints and drawings, collectors' stamps and sale catalogues. An authority on Rembrandt's drawings, he collected all of the known etchings made by Rembrandt during his career.

Lugt was a precocious connoisseur who made a catalog of his own Museum Lugtius at age eight. Encouraged by his father, he became an art expert at a young age and cut short his formal education in 1901 to become an employee at the auction house of Frederik Muller in Amsterdam. Lugt's marriage in 1910 to Jacoba Klever, a woman of independent means, meant that he could pursue his interests without financial concerns. By 1911, he had become a partner of the firm, a position he held until 1915. One of his tasks at the auction house was the compilation of auctioneers' sale catalogues. Though art history as an academic field did not exist, he made a difficult choice to focus on this, and gave up his budding art career. He began to collect art with his wife, travelling throughout Europe for this and focusing on masters of the Dutch Golden Age. Upon the death of his father-in-law in 1931, his wife inherited a sizeable fortune, which enabled the couple to expand their collecting interests.

His ongoing interest resulted in the four volumes of his famous Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques intéressant l'art ou la curiosité published in 1938, 1953, 1964, and (posthumously) 1987, which gives essential details of sales catalogues published during the years 1600–1925, held in public collections in Europe and North America. While he was still occupied with this project, he donated his huge collection of sale catalogues and other documentary materials to the Netherlands Bureau for Art History at The Hague along with his personal library, in the nature of a "permanent loan."

In 1921, he completed his first work essential to art historians, Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, the definitive repertory identifying the collector's marks and stamps on drawings and prints, with a short descriptive biography of each owner and a description of the particular collection; the work is the essential reference for establishing the provenance of Old Master drawings and prints. In 1956, this first volume on collectors' marks was followed by a Supplément.

In 1922, he was commissioned to compile the inventory catalogue of Dutch and Flemish drawings in the Musée du Louvre. The first volume appeared in 1927, the series eventually comprising nine volumes cataloguing drawings of the Northern schools not only from the Louvre's collection but also in other collections in Paris, including the Petit Palais (the collection of Eugène Dutuit), the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the École des Beaux-Arts.