Background
Evelyn Joll was born on February 6, 1925, in London, United Kingdom. He was the only child of the surgeon Cecil Augustus Joll and his first wife Laura.
1963
Evelyn Joll with his colleagues.
1970
Sothebys Bookshop, 34-35 New Bond St, Mayfair, London W1S 2RT, United Kingdom
Auction at Sotheby's English art dealer and chairman of Thomas Agnew & Sons Geoffrey Agnew and art dealer Evelyn Joll at an auction held at Sotheby's, London, United Kingdom.
1994
Evelyn Joll with his wife at Sotheby's 250th Birthday.
Harley St, Marylebone, London W1G 8BT, United Kingdom
Young Evelyn first attended school at Queen's College, Harley Street, a girls' school at which he and the son of the Japanese ambassador were the only boys.
Oxford OX1 4AU, United Kingdom
Joll studied at Magdalen College.
1 Loudoun Rd, St John's Wood, London NW8 0LH, United Kingdom
Joll studied at Arnold House School.
Bardwell Rd, Oxford OX2 6SS, United Kingdom
Joll was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford.
Search Results Windsor SL4 6DW, United Kingdom
Joll was educated at Eton.
(This revised edition of the award-winning catalogue raiso...)
This revised edition of the award-winning catalogue raisonne of Turner's paintings is now available in a paperbound edition.
https://www.amazon.com/Paintings-J-M-W-Turner/dp/0300032765/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=evelyn+joll&qid=1578919081&sr=8-1
1984
Evelyn Joll was born on February 6, 1925, in London, United Kingdom. He was the only child of the surgeon Cecil Augustus Joll and his first wife Laura.
Young Evelyn first attended school at Queen's College, Harley Street, a girls' school at which he and the son of the Japanese ambassador were the only boys. He went on to Arnold House in St John's Wood - where pupils were required to address mistresses as "Sir" - and, prior to Eton, to the Dragon preparatory school in Oxford, where he once bowled A. P. Herbert first ball in the annual fathers' match. Joll was educated at Queen's College in Harley Street, the Arnold House School in St John's Wood, the Dragon School in Oxford and Eton College.
Called up in August 1943, Joll was commissioned in the King's Royal Rifle Corps - the 60th Rifles - one of the regiments now amalgamated in the Green Jackets. He served with his regiment in Greece in 1945/46.
The offer of a place to read History at Magdalen, Oxford then enabled him to obtain release from the Army. At Oxford, Joll was tutored by A. J. P. Taylor and Raymond Carr.
Shortly after coming down, Joll was invited in December 1949 by his wife's cousin, Geoffrey Agnew, to join his family's auction house. (As a schoolboy during the war, Joll had encountered Agnew as a part-time history master at Eton.)
Joll acquired his expertise in the traditional way, chiefly by working alongside Geoffrey Agnew, and also with Colin Agnew, the senior partner, whose great enthusiasm for and love of the visual arts was infectious.
Joll quickly developed a taste for early Italian and Dutch painting, and also for watercolors. His special interest in Turner was fired by an exhibition mounted by Agnew's to celebrate the centenary of the painter's birth.
Having been dominant in the market for works by Turner since the 1860s, Agnew's were well-placed to know the whereabouts of the majority of the artist's pictures in private ownership, and accordingly to stage a splendid show.
In 1955 Joll became a director of Agnew's, and in 1962 he began to catalogue Turner's oil paintings. Over the next 15 years, Joll saw all of the Turners that he wrote about. He was a director of Thomas Agnew and Sons from 1955, and as chairman from 1982 to 1992.
Having shown a key exhibition of Turner's works at Agnew's in 1951, Evelyn became one of the triumvirate that selected the great Turner bicentenary exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1974-75; a quarter of a century later, he was closely involved in the matchless Turner: The Great Watercolours, which recently closed at the Royal Academy.
He collaborated with Martin Butlin, then keeper of the British collection at the Tate Gallery, in The Paintings of JMW Turner, a fully rounded catalogue raisonné of some 560 paintings (1977, revised edition 1984), justly awarded the Mitchell Prize for Art History in 1978. Each of Turner's paintings is now universally distinguished by its B&J number in this catalogue, a recognition of authoritativeness earned by few scholars. Butlin catalogued the paintings in public collections, Evelyn the (generally) less well- researched paintings in private collections. As Butlin recognised, Evelyn's was the more exacting task.
Agnew's conceded Evelyn six months' leave to complete work that might have occupied the average academic for a decade. He had years of observations to draw upon, but the greater part of the work was achieved through resolution and stamina.
With his flair for gamesmanship, but within the constraints of orthodoxy, Evelyn enlivened even the factual apparatus of this catalogue, discreetly inserting, for instance, an exclamation mark to note the length of time a dealer may have had a Turner on his hands before achieving a sale. While giving John Ruskin his fair share of quotation, Evelyn's commentaries are mercifully far from Ruskinian; invariably level-headed, he balanced admiration for Turner with keen analytical scrutiny of his works; and he was notably generous in acknowledging other scholars' observations. More recently, Evelyn was the driving editorial and contributing force behind The Oxford Companion to Turner, published earlier this year, while he was valiantly battling against cancer.
(This revised edition of the award-winning catalogue raiso...)
1984In his blend of cool common sense and jocularity, Evelyn was sui generis. Broad-minded, level-headed, free from snobbery and with a keen perception of the absurd, he boasted a sense of humour that ranged from the teasing to the mordant, according to his perception of what the traffic would bear. His sardonic nicknames for pompous acquaintances occasionally leaked out, paradoxically becoming much prized by their subjects, and he was a highly entertaining and unguarded correspondent. Evelyn frequently travelled abroad to attend foreign sales or to update valuations, and always made a point of walking off with the hotel bedroom's supply of writing paper. Months, even years, later, one might get a letter purporting to come par avion from Minneapolis or Monte-video, though undeniably postmarked London.
Evelyn had innumerable friends; but was never happier than at home, with his unutterably staunch wife Pam, writer and personality in her own right, and with their son, three daughters and seven grandchildren as the most welcome of all visitors.
Although himself both clear-brained and logical, Joll relished oddity in others. His favourite clients were the eccentric ones, like the 60-year-old corn chandler who only bought pictures small enough to hide under his bed because he didn't want his mother to know he was spending money on works of art. Then there was the elderly Irish peer from whom Agnew's bought a nine foot long Tintoretto, who said afterwards that he had a pair to it "by the same fellow" hanging in his stables.
Joll derived extraordinary pleasure from the beauty of English and Italian landscape. He was an exacting map-reader, loving to plan in advance time-saving routes which required concentration from his navigator.
From his father he had inherited a passion for bird-watching and he could be as indignant with anyone who misidentified a species as he was if they wrongly attributed an English watercolour.
Perhaps his happiest times were when he was sailing in the Solent, or driving around Umbria with his wife. At his house in the Isle of Wight, which was often bursting with his grandchildren and their friends, he loved to organize quizzes, scavenger hunts, bathing parties and competitive games on the lawn or tennis court.
Evelyn Joll married Pamela Sybil Kingzett in 1949. They had four children: Caroline L. Joll (born in 1950), William Evelyn Hinton Joll (born in 1953), Charlotte Elizabeth Joll (born in 1955), Harriet S. Joll (born in 1959).