Background

John Rowlands was born on September 18, 1931, in Liverpool, United Kingdom. He was the eldest of two children of an artist and violinist Arthur and Margaret Rowlands.

Education

John Rowlands studied at King's School in Chester. He also received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge.

Career

In 1956 John Rowlands joined the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. There he was responsible for the David Cox centenary exhibition catalog in 1959 and moved to Clarendon Press in Oxford in 1960 as editor of Oxford University Press's art books. Five years later, he joined the British Museum as deputy keeper and then keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings.

While working at the British Museum, Rowlands has written several exhibition catalogs, including The Age of Dürer and Holbein: German Drawings 1400-1550, which accompanied an exhibit he developed at the museum in 1988. He envisaged the exhibition as a survey of one hundred and fifty years of German draughtsmanship, not only from the Museum's own holdings but also including loans from other public and private collections in Britain. In addition to its focus on the famous artists Dürer and Holbein, the exhibition also thoroughly explores the riches, varieties, and curiosities, including many from earlier periods often hidden in unexpected places.

Among John Rowlands's important works was a monograph on the paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger. The author deals effectively with questions of attribution and allows us to form a much clearer idea of Holbein's stylistic development. Rowlands also published Drawings by German Artists at the British Museum in 1993, a magnificent work that was several years in the making, and collaborated on Following the Trail of a Lost Collection, a Dutch film about how a collection of European art ended up in Russia after the Second World War. After retiring in 1991, John Rowlands enjoyed taking visitors on "church crawls," and once playing the organ at Sunday services around the county.

Achievements

• John Rowlands was widely known as an art historian and writer. He served at the British Museum for more than thirty years. As a writer, one of Rowlands's important work was Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Bosch 1975
  • Rubens 1977
  • Hercules Segers 1979
  • German Drawings from a Private Collection 1984
  • Master Drawings and Watercolours in the British Museum 1984
  • Holbein 1985
  • The Age of Durer and Holbein 1988

Membership

• Beefsteak Club , United Kingdom

Personality

John Rowlands was a man of great humor, brimming with enthusiasm.

Interests

• Making music

Connections

John Rowlands married Else Bachmann in 1957. That marriage dissolved in 1981, and in 1982 he married Lorna Lowe. Rowlands had one son and two daughters from the first marriage and one daughter from the second marriage.

Father:

Arthur Rowlands

Mother:

Margaret Rowlands

ex-wife:

Else A. H. Bachmann

Else Bachmann was John Rowlands's first wife. They divorced in 1981.

Wife:

Lorna Jane Lowe

Lorna Jane Lowe was John Rowlands's second wife.