Journal of Icon Studies, Volume 4 | Fall 2025

abstract

This article concentrates on the activities of Richard Hare, whose interest in icons sheds new light on the history of British and western collecting of and scholarship on Russian art in the twentieth century. For British audiences, as elsewhere in the west, Russian icons, their historical origins, and cultural significance were little understood beyond specialist circles. But, for a few decades in the mid twentieth century, they gained new visibility in the British art world. Despite this, probably for political reasons, state-owned museums did not extend their holdings and the gap was filled by a private collector: Hare, this article argues, was the first British collector of icons in significant numbers. He is a valuable case study of a western collector of Russian art, but his particular attention to icons illustrates an important leitmotif in the under-researched picture of Anglo-Soviet artistic relations, namely, the persistence of Byzantinism in British responses to Russian art.

author

Louise Hardiman, Ph.D., is an independent art historian based in Guildford, U.K., whose career spans teaching, writing, and consultancy. Her current research projects examine women and the arts in imperial Russia, northern landscape painting, and the history of British-Russian cultural exchange; her recent teaching includes the development of new courses on Russian art and Ukrainian art for University of Cambridge Professional and Continuing Education.

citation

Recommended Citation: Louise Hardiman, “Richard Hare’s Russian Icon Collection and the Persistent Lure of Byzantium in Anglo-Soviet Artistic Relations,” Journal of Icon Studies 4, 2025

license

The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). All images are reproduced with the permission of the rights holders acknowledged in captions, or are reproduced under license, and are expressly excluded from the CC BY license covering the rest of this publication. These images may not be reproduced, copied, transmitted, or manipulated without consent from the owners, who reserve all rights, and outside the terms of any specified license.

keywords

Richard Hare, Russian Icons, Dorich House, Russian Studies, Soviet Union.

Museum collections of Russian icons in are rare in Britain, the three main examples being those of the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Dorich House Museum (part of Kingston University, London).^[1] All are relatively small, but the latter is arguably the most historically significant, for it was formed in the mid-twentieth century as part of a larger collection of Russian art assembled by Richard Hare (1907–1966), a professor of Russian literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, with support from his Latvian-born émigré wife, the sculptor Dora Gordine (formerly Gordin, 1895–1991) [fig. 1]. This article concentrates on the activities of Hare, whose interest in icons sheds new light on the history of British and Western collecting of and scholarship on Russian art in the twentieth century. For British audiences, as elsewhere in the West, the historical origins and cultural significance of Russian icons were little understood outside specialist circles. But, for a few decades in the mid twentieth century, they gained new visibility in the British art world. Despite this, probably for political reasons, state-owned museums did not extend their holdings, and the gap was filled by a private collector: Hare, this article argues, was the first significant British collector of icons. He is a valuable case study of a Western collector of Russian art, but his particular attention to icons illustrates an important leitmotif in the under-researched picture of Anglo-Soviet artistic relations, namely, the persistence of Byzantinism in British responses to Russian art.^[2]

Over his lifetime, Hare accumulated hundreds of works of imperial Russian fine, decorative, and religious art, mostly dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within this larger pattern of collecting, he was drawn to icons, his awareness of their importance perhaps reflecting his wider interests in Russian history. Hare and Gordine had hoped that the larger collection ultimately would become Britain’s first Russian art museum, but Hare’s untimely death due to a heart attack in 1966, when he was fifty-nine, made this prospect less straightforward.Gordine lived into her nineties and died in 1991. A period of uncertainty for the house followed, and the art collection was significantly reduced in size through a series of sales at auction. Some works had already been lost after a burglary during Gordine’s later years.

As a consequence, Hare’s original collection of around sixty icons was reduced to twenty. Including the icons, around two hundred objects remain at what is now Dorich House Museum at Kingston University.^[3]

This article adopts several approaches to assess Hare’s icon collecting. After summarizing what is known about Hare, the objects, and his collecting activity, I examine Hare’s scholarship on Russian icons and their treatment in his monograph, The Art and Artists of Russia, published in 1965 [fig. 2].^[4] This book was heavily informed by the collection, with many of its objects used as illustrations. Next, I consider the connections that Hare may have forged with other Western collectors of icons. Lastly, I examine Hare’s activities in the context of the history of British appreciation and study of Byzantine art. This approach reflects the fact that Hare’s collecting began after Byzantine studies had emerged as an academic discipline in Britain (namely, in the mid- to late nineteenth century) but before Russian art studies appeared around a century later.^[5] Hare, I contend, was one of a new cohort of Western writers, museum specialists, and art historians who were becoming interested in all kinds of Orthodox icons, including Russian, and regarded Russian culture through the lens of Eastern Christianity.

Richard Hare, born Gilbert Richard Hare, was from an aristocratic British family and, as the second son of Richard Granville Hare (1866–1931), Fourth Earl of Listowel, was entitled to call himself “The Honourable Richard Hare.”^[6] The dynasty belonged to the former Anglo-Irish ruling class known as the “Protestant Ascendancy,” and Hare’s privileged position within the upper ranks of the British class system facilitated his career within the establishment.^[7] After a boarding-school education at Rugby School, he went on to study Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (“PPE”) at the University of Oxford in 1925. He continued his academic studies in Paris and Berlin. It was while he was at Oxford that Hare first met Gordine through mutual friends, including several who would go on to have stellar careers: the renowned physician and academic Janet Vaughan, the art critic and Bloomsbury scion Roger Fry, and the poet and Russia missionary George Simons. The meeting of Gordine and Hare strengthened his connections to Russia; he had begun learning Russian at school, and Gordine, who had grown up in Latvia and Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire, perhaps helped him with his studies.^[8] However, the Hares did not marry until around a decade later, in 1936. They were a well-matched couple, Hare’s quiet studiousness complementing Gordine’s extroversion and creative flair. Each supported the other in the pursuit of their interests, a symbiosis reflected in the name for the building that Gordine designed as studio, display space, and home: “Dorich,” linking “Dora” and “Richard.”

When his father died in 1931, Hare joined the diplomatic service and took up a post as third secretary to the British embassy in Paris. With the coming of the Second World War, his knowledge of Russian was likely a factor in Hare’s appointment as “Senior Assistant Specialist” in the Anglo-Soviet Relations division of the Ministry of Information, part of the Foreign Office. This was in March 1942, and within a few years, he became deputy head and then divisional head.^[9] His time at the division included a posting in Moscow from March to August 1945.^[10] Little is known of Hare’s activities, whether political or cultural, during his stint. Notably, his superior in the division, Peter Smollett (an alias for Peter Smolka), was later uncovered as a Soviet agent working for the NKVD Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del, People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs).^[11] However, no evidence has emerged to suggest that Hare, too, was a spy. At the end of the war, the Ministry was wound up, and, in 1946, Hare started an academic career. In autumn 1947, the couple moved to California, where Hare held a year-long Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to research Russian literary archives at Stanford University.^[12] Upon their return to England, Hare gained a post as lecturer in Russian literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London. He worked his way up to Head of Department and held this role until his death.^[13] During his career, Hare published widely on Russian literature and culture, including books on Maxim Gorky and a series of essays on Russian literature and Russian thought.^[14] He also translated stories by Turgenev, Bunin, and others.^[15]

It is unclear for exactly how many years Hare and Gordine collected art. The works they acquired are mainly decorative art dating from the late eighteenth century to 1917. The Russian holdings formed the larger part of the collection, but pieces from elsewhere included, for example, Chinese and South-East Asian art accumulated by Gordine when she lived in Johor, Malaysia, and Singapore and traveled widely in the region during her second marriage.^[16] Besides icons, the Russian art works and objects included porcelain, silver, metalware, glassware, textiles, carved wood objects, furniture, paintings, prints, and other miscellaneous items. Some surviving publications in the collection point to an interest in Russian elite culture, such as several volumes of the late imperial-era art journals Stolitsa i usad’ba (The Capital and the Mansion) and Khudozhestvennye sokrovishcha Rossii (Art Treasures of Russia).^[17] Hare’s interest in imperial art works, many undoubtedly sold by displaced émigrés, perhaps reflected sympathy for the fate of the noble classes after the Revolution and the need for a museum to preserve at-risk treasures. Art collecting was common practice for the British upper classes, as was a desire for public service. Hare’s financial position is not known, but his wish for a museum reflects the rise in elite philanthropy over the preceding century. More importantly, Hare and Gordine believed that a museum was needed for a nation’s art that had rarely been displayed outside the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Indeed, Hare can be considered an early British advocate for Russian art, at a time when few of his peer group shared his quest to make the subject better known in the West.^[18]

During the auctions of the larger collection, all the icons put up for sale were sold. Although the precise history of the sales has yet to be researched, it seems that one factor influencing the decision as to which icons to keep was whether Hare had discussed them in The Art and Artists of Russia. For example, the late eighteenth-century icon of Saints Florus and Laurus featured on the book’s cover image was retained, as were the three icons that are visible in a surviving photograph of Hare’s desk. This photograph shows nine icons hanging on a batik textile and another positioned across the corner of the room in the traditional Orthodox manner [fig. 3].^[19] The other six works seen in this image are presumed sold or lost. Notably, many of this group have an oklad or basma(decorative and protective metal sheathing), hinting that for Hare their adornments were as valued as the icons beneath. But speculating as to Hare’s intentions is fraught with difficulty. With virtually no historical records of the purchases, assessing motives is as problematic as interpreting the works’ provenance. And there is another issue: these acquisitions happened in a limited marketplace. Many icons available in the West at the time Hare was collecting were considered then to be of low value and lacking aesthetic quality, and some of his icons fell into this bracket.

Nevertheless, the supply was there. Scholars have documented the history of the widespread removal and destruction of icons and the desecration of churches under first Bolshevik and then Soviet rule, beginning in the early 1920s and reaching a peak in the 1930s. Many looted objects ended up on the foreign marketplace. In February 1922, the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) issued a decree, “On the confiscation of property without museum significance located in churches and monasteries,” which created a distinction between works that the Soviet authorities wished to keep and those they were willing to sell. Although rules were not strictly followed, the decree did make it far less likely that a Western collector could acquire the oldest and rarest icons.^[20] (Incidentally, this largely explains why, despite the official Soviet policy of atheism, some of the major Russian museums today have such extensive holdings of icons by the likes of Andrei Rublev, Theophanes the Greek, and other revered painters, while foreign museums do not.)

Waltraud Bayer describes how the Soviet art sales to the West began. Initially, most transactions went through dealers in Germany and Austria, who enjoyed connections to the two main Soviet trading entities, Antikvariat and Gostorg. Early exports were mostly of Western European art and rarely included icons, because “the authorities feared negligible public and, consequently market interest, because such goods had no market value in the west.”^[21] At this time, Hare was still at university and presumably not yet collecting. From 1928, when Antikvariat gained a monopoly on art exports, icons began to be sold in greater number. Several exhibitions were held in the West aimed at making icons more visible to potential buyers.^[22] As Wendy Salmond writes, icon collecting in the West thus emerged as a direct consequence of the Soviet policy to dispose of ecclesiastical treasures to an increasingly receptive market.^[23] And, she further describes how pioneering collectors, such as the Americans George Hann and Joseph E. Davies, benefited from the sale of high-quality collections specially arranged for them by Antikvariat.^[24] Such arrangements were an exception to the decision to keep icons that were deemed treasured antiquities in Russia. Most often, the icons that appeared for sale in the West were newer works, frequently of lower value. But pieces with metalwork crafted by luxury makers, such as the Fabergé and Co. workshops, were available. Astute Western dealers like Armand and Victor Hammer obtained many expensive late nineteenth-century icons with imperial provenance and sold them at a profit. Another source for dealers and collectors was the sale of assets by “white Russian” émigrés who had escaped to Europe and often joined the social world of the Western elite. They included notable Byzantinists, such as Dmitry Obolensky and Nikolai Andreyev. If Gordine, herself an émigré from the Russian Empire, and Hare, a Russia specialist, mixed with this group, the evidence has yet to come to light. However, the possibility cannot be ruled out.

For the above reasons, it is hard to know precisely how Hare’s collecting fit into this broader picture.But some comparisons can be drawn between his activity and that of two twentieth-century American collectors: firstly, Davies’s divorced wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, whose collection is now at the Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens in Washington, DC, and secondly, Amy Putnam, whose collection is at the Timken Museum in San Diego.^[25] Like Hare’s collection, Post’s includes a wider selection of Russian decorative art. Hillwood currently holds eighty-four icons, a comparable number to Hare’s original collection. But the Washington-based museum has many more valuable icons and Post’s earlier acquisitions were supplemented by a gift of thirty-one icons in the late 1960s.^[26] By contrast, Hare’s collection was entirely his own personal selection.

Hare was more similar to Putnam, whose interest in collecting seems to have also stemmed from a broader interest in Russian literature and culture.^[27] Unlike Post and her husband, whose collecting began during his assignment to Moscow, no evidence has emerged to confirm whether Hare acquired artworks while he was in Russia; however, his visit might have been a starting point for his interest.^[28] It is possible that he bought from official Soviet trade organizations when he was in the USSR, from the Hammers, or from other well-known Western dealers (for example, Alexander Schaffer’s New York store, A la Vieille Russie). Some of Hare’s icons have labels for Western auction houses on the back; one has a label in Cyrillic: “Mosgostorg. Antikvarno-Khudozhestvennyi Otdel.” ^[29] Supply was limited in the interwar years, so it is more likely that he began collecting after the war, on the secondary market. The dating of objects in the collection—mostly nineteenth-century works—supports this theory.^[30] There are no obvious links to museum collections in Russia, unlike those for some icons bought by Davies, Hann, and Post. There are no treasures from the Novgorod School (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries), nor from before the schism in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, when the Russian Orthodox Church split into two camps (namely, those who accepted the reforms spearheaded by Patriarch Nikon and those who rejected them, the so-called Old Believers).

By the mid-twentieth century, icons were available through a network of dealers and shops in the West. Oral testimony in the Dorich House Museum archives provides a few hints as to sources. A former acquaintance of theirs stated that the couple had scoured Europe, perusing fairs, flea markets, and antique shops, returning with a “car full of objects.”^[31] Other purchases were made closer to home, such as the Russian art dealership The Winter Palace, set up by Nicholas Hill and located in Kensington Church Street. Margot Tracey, joint owner, recounted that she had been introduced to the Hares at a party around 1946; some objects in the collection have been linked to the shop, although to date none of the icons.^[32] Tracey also recalled that the Hares bought Russian art from a Mrs. Eckstein, a dealer based in Jermyn Street in the fashionable St. James’s district of London.

The dispersal at auction of most of the Hare collection heavily affected the icons. The loss was compounded by the absence of records, which likely were lost or destroyed during a period of dereliction. This creates problems with analyzing the collection today, both past and present.

The relatively small size of the original collection at less than one hundred icons is nevertheless comparable to that of other twentieth-century Western collections. The twenty icons present today represent around a quarter of the original tally of icons and other ecclesiastical objects, such as panagiaria and metal crosses [fig. 4]. They demonstrate craftsmanship in a range of methods and mediums (tempera on wood, metalwork, embroidery, and enamel) and a variety of iconographic types.^[33] There are two icons of the Anastasis, one of which is of the polnitsy (full-cycle) type, showing the four Evangelists and the sixteen festivals of the Church. Two other icons are portable: a Deesis triptych icon with a metal oklad and an enamel oval icon depicting Rostov miracle workers. There are two crucifix icons: a seventeenth-century wooden cross, which was one of the oldest objects in the collection, and a nineteenth-century brass crucifix set in wood (one of the very popular staurotheke icons made by Old Believers).^[34]

As well as the lack of provenance, other problems arise when trying to assess the sold works. These objects were a tiny proportion of the grand total of around 2,400 art works that were listed at some fifty-four auctions, most of them open to the public and including works not limited to Gordine and Hare’s possessions.^[35] However, sixty icons are listed in the catalogue of the largest exclusive sale, restricted to items from Hare’s collection, which was held at Phillips, London, in November 1994. Data from the catalogue enables the sold icons to be sorted by age, price, and type [fig. 5].^[36] Most valuable by far was a sixteenth-century Russian vita icon of Saint Nicholas of Zaraisk [fig. 6], priced at £14,000–18,000. Other works of higher value than the collection average included a Petrovskaia Mother of God [fig. 7], valued at £2000–3000, and a pair of large Deesis icons that unfortunately were not photographed.^[37] Some works were not Russian, including a large Cretan Entombment of Christ and a Saint George and Dragon from the Greek Islands, both dated as seventeenth century. But these were exceptions. Most icons at the auction were judged by the appraisers to be of mediocre quality and priced at a few hundred pounds or less. Some ecclesiastical crosses and pendants were listed with metalware (virtually all of which was sold). A rare sixteenth-century reliquary cross, said to still hold relics, was one of the highest valued items at £1,500–2,000.^[38] The chart in figure 5 confirms that most icons dated to the nineteenth century. One such icon was Saint Antipii and Saint Michael, encased in a parcel gilt and enameled oklad. This was priced at £400–600 in 1994, which would be £750–1100 today.^[39]

Hare’s decision to collect a wide array of imperial Russian art and icons was, it seems, without precedent in Britain. Indeed, the catalogue for one of the early Russian art shows in London in the Soviet period, the Exhibition of Russian Art of 1935, suggests that before World War II, British collecting of any kind of Russian art, let alone icons, was in its infancy.^[40] As Anthony Cross notes, the organizers of this exhibition relied entirely on loans from private British or European collectors.^[41] Many of the latter were Russian émigrés, and the catalogue reveals some key names and their collecting interests. According to the catalogue, the icons on display seem to have been primarily owned by Emlyn Reynolds.^[42] Reynolds lent ten ecclesiastical art objects, including icons. Eight were listed in the “Enamels” section (two icons, a cross, two plaques, medallions of Christ and of the Virgin, and a reliquary) and two in “Jewellery” (a silver-gilt icon of Christ and an icon cover in beads and seed pearls). The fact that Reynolds’s name has vanished from the historical record suggests that this probably was the full extent of his collection.^[43] Other icon exhibits came from dealers, such as Wartski and A la Vieille Russie, and émigrés, many of them Paris-based.

Another hint that Hare had no rivals is that Cyril G. E. Bunt made no mention of British collections when he published his 1946 book, Russian Art from Scyths to Soviets. For icons, Bunt illustrated works from the Hann and Lanza collections, along with a few older icons from Russian museums.^[44] And in 1938, when British Byzantine-art specialist David Talbot Rice gave a public lecture on Russian icons, he relied on illustrations from Soviet publications.^[45] Although such a conclusion is necessarily speculative, it seems reasonable to infer that Hare was the first British collector of significance.

Although unusual, Hare’s interest in icons arguably reflects prevailing British attitudes to Russian art in the mid-twentieth century. British scholars and critics were certainly aware of Russian art, but more often this meant that of pre-Revolutionary Russia and not contemporary Soviet art, as would remain the case for much of the twentieth century. But icons were already in a somewhat different category to other kinds of Russian art due to their connection with Byzantine culture. The reception of Russian icons can thus be positioned within the broader Byzantine revival that had begun in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, which meant that some devotees of Byzantine art also extended their interests to Russian religious art.^[46]

As Richard Marks observes, British views of Russian icons in the nineteenth century ranged from positive to hostile.^[47] From around 1880, concomitant with new discoveries of antiquities in Central Asia and the Near East, museum communities and art writers began to take an interest in icons and ecclesiastical art.^[48] A handful of Russian icons entered museum collections at this time; indeed, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum have several examples that arrived from larger private collections of Byzantine art or as single donations.^[49] The first British monograph on Russian art, Russian Art and Art Objects in Russia, written by Alfred Maskell for the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1884, has two chapters on religious art that consider church architecture, metalwork, and other devotional objects including icons—the latter described by Maskell as “the chief source of the religious instruction of the Russian peasant.”^[50] Subsequent British accounts were few. They include essays on icons by historian Robert Steele for two wartime publications: The Soul of Russia (1916), an interdisciplinary anthology issued to gain public support for the wartime alliance, and the catalogue for the first wide-ranging exhibition of Russian art in London, held in 1918.^[51] This exhibition was notable for the inclusion of 120 icons. Echoing Maskell’s description, they were displayed in the “Peasant Art” section, thereby reflecting his perception of them as curios rather than fine art.

In the early twentieth century, interest in the art traditions of Byzantium and how these were manifested in Russian culture continued to rise.^[52] A nexus with modernist circles developed as early as 1908. Two British critics, Frank Rutter and Roger Fry, presented displays of Russian art in modern art exhibitions that foregrounded ancient art and its recent revival in the avant-garde and Arts and Crafts movements. At this time, Russian painting in the academic, secular, and Westernized tradition promulgated by Empress Catherine II was largely ignored in British art circles. In autumn 1908, Rutter invited the Arts and Crafts patron Princess Maria Tenisheva to present a Russian section for his London Salon, which he had billed as showcasing the latest developments in modern art. The works selected by Tenisheva were revivalist, such as her own craft enamels modeled on Byzantine precedents [fig. 8].^[53] Four years later, when Fry decided to include Russian art in his Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912, he turned to Russian émigré Boris Anrep, an artist whose retrospectively styled mosaic work again drew inspiration from Byzantium.[54] For Fry, Anrep foregrounded the Byzantine in his curatorial choices for Russian modern art. For example, for the avant-gardist Natalia Goncharova, Anrep chose her icon-inspired panels of the four Evangelists.

Such examples of neo-Byzantinism represented the Russian icon tradition at a distance once removed, for icons themselves had hardly been seen at exhibitions, even in Russia. This changed in 1913, when they were exhibited in Saint Petersburg and Moscow to celebrate the Romanov tercentenary. Many years later, Hare would acquire a copy of the catalogue for the Delovoi Dvor exhibition in Moscow, showing his knowledge of the importance of this landmark event in the acceptance of icons as art. In the ensuing decades, developments in Byzantine and Russo-Byzantine studies were reported in publications in the West, for example, in the work of the scholars Franz Bock and Louis Réau.^[55] Critics like Fry took note; in the same year that he curated the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Fry wrote an essay for The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs on John Pierpont Morgan’s acquisition of Russo-Byzantine art—examples of twelfth-century enamels from the collection of Alexander von Zwenigorodskoi [fig. 9].^[56] (Morgan’s acquisition is contextualized in the essay by Mariam Charlton in the present volume.) As well as being discussed by Bock, the Zwenigorodskoi enamels had been featured in articles by Ormonde M. Dalton in recent issues, and Fry was writing in response.^[57] His comments indicate the coming shift in taste: what had previously been solely of archaeological interest could now be regarded as art. Even if the attitudes of Fry and Hare differed in many ways, this was an observation that foretold the next generation’s interest in icons.

Fry distinguishes collecting for its own sake from collecting for aesthetic reasons: “The aesthete (if one may use once more a word that ought by now to have lost its unfortunate associations) looks with suspicion upon collections as such. This suspicion is natural, for the aesthete and the collector have different methods of valuation.”^[58] But Fry notices how such Byzantine works as the enamels were once overlooked as “curiosities and bibelots:”

Conway, who at the time was director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Fry continued to show an interest in Russian icons during the 1920s and early 1930s. Both were involved in the first project to stage a museum display of icons in London, a touring exhibition of Western capitals masterminded by the artist and Soviet arts bureaucrat Igor Grabar.^[62] This major loan of icons owned by the Soviet government took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1929 [fig. 10]. It was a complex Anglo-Soviet project, and in addition to Conway and Fry, the organizing committee comprised a golden cast of names from the art world, academia, and Russian émigré circles. According to Salmond, it was Fry who had suggested that the Victoria and Albert Museum host the exhibition.^[63] Again testifying to their scholarship on Russian icons, both he and Conway wrote essays for the catalogue. Evidently, this was a major event in the London art world, its staging in no way hindered by difficult memories of the Russian Revolution or civil war.

Hare had moved to Paris at some point in 1929, and there is no record of whether he saw Fry and Conway’s exhibition. What he did see, though, was the associated book, Masterpieces of Russian Painting, published around the same time, as he cites it in his scholarship.^[64] Leading up to the exhibition, there had been some interest in British art circles in publishing a book on Russian art. According to Galya Diment, this effort was supported by Fry, who had introduced the émigré writer Samuel Koteliansky to an editor at Chatto and Windus so that they could discuss plans for “a history of Russian art in English.”^[65] The publication did not materialize, but both Fry and Conway were involved in the project by Koteliansky’s friend Mikhail Farbman to produce Masterpieces—a more narrowly scoped book. Continuing their earlier teamwork, Conway took on the role of editor.

The exhibition and Masterpieces of Russian Painting were, as Marks comments, “a seminal moment in British experience of icon-painting.”^[66] They provided a foundation for later scholarship of Russian and Byzantine art and may have catalyzed Hare’s interests both as collector and writer. The post-Revolutionary years saw the appearance in the West of several books on Russian art, from Réau’s L’Art russe des origines à Pierre le grand (Russian Art from its Origins to Peter the Great, 1921) to Georgi Loukomski’s L’Art décoratif russe (Russian Decorative Arts, 1928).^[67] With his multilingual skills, Hare thus had plenty of material for his own research. There was also Russian scholar Nikodim Kondakov’s foundational book, The Russian Icon, which had recently been translated into English by the historian Ellis Hovel Minns, a professor at the University of Cambridge.^[68] An eminent scholar of Scythian and nomadic archaeology, Minns had also been involved in the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition as a committee member.

Around three decades after the publication of Masterpieces of Russian Painting, Hare published his own book on Russian art, including icons: The Art and Artists of Russia (1965). For reasons which are unclear, the book was first published in a German translation, with the title Tausend Jahre Russische Kunst [A Thousand Years of Russian Art] and the English version appeared the following year. Important for the present account is the fact that the book’s opening chapter is one of the earliest British scholarly accounts of the history of Russian icons. Hare’s book came out shortly before his sudden death in 1966; when he was working on it, he could hardly have expected that it would be his last word on the topic.^[69] Hare stated that his motive was to fill a gap in British knowledge of Russian culture. The project also enabled him to integrate his own collection into the historiography: he used some of his own objects as illustrations and discussed them in the text. For example, his Mol’chenskaia Mother of God icon appears beside a Mother of God from A la Vieille Russie to emphasize the beauty of their oklads [fig. 11].^[70] These oklads he described as representing “the majestic court art of the metropolis,” produced at the State Armory. Contrasting town and country work, Hare pictured one of his crucifixes, noting the existence of “pious and authentic but far simpler schools closer to the late Novgorod style and . . . composition [emphasis added]” (34).^[71] Hare’s placing of simpler pieces alongside renowned treasures was a forward-thinking, inclusive approach to art history that was unusual for its time, and it may have developed from his training as a cultural historian as well as his experience as an art connoisseur.

Indeed, a more comprehensive understanding of Hare’s scholarship, methodologies, and approaches would require extensive biographical research that is beyond the scope of this article. For example, the bibliography in The Art and Artists includes several Russian books that may not necessarily have come from British library holdings; some of the rare books from his personal library were included in auction sales. Despite the wide-ranging sources Hare consulted for his book, he was not a specialist when it came to icons. He thanks Nikolai Andreyev for his expertise in the acknowledgments, hinting that he likely took advice from Russian scholars. Between 1938 and 1945, Andreyev was director of the Seminarium Kondakovianum in Prague, the institute founded by supporters of Kondakov in 1925, before his imprisonment by the Soviets. After escaping to Britain, Andreyev had joined the Faculty of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge in 1948.^[72] It is unlikely that the two men had a close connection, as Hare is not mentioned in Andreyev’s memoirs, but the Russian scholar would have been a useful local source to scholarly information on this complex topic.^[73] The relationship may explain why Hare was so effusive in his praise for Kondakov in The Art and Artists of Russia, calling him “the greatest Russian art historian” (23). Although the statement seems bold, Kondakov’s work was respected among Byzantinists in the West, and the Seminarium Kondakovianum was a leading center of scholarship.

Hare’s own strong opinions abound in his chronological summary of Eastern history, even if he relied heavily on help from others. For example, he writes that the Orthodox believer eschews “the self-centered modern craving for artistic ‘originality’ and petty individual self-assertion,” (24) and he claims that figures by Dionysius, a late fifteenth-century master, are “attenuated, limp and sprawling” and display “anaemic detachment” (30). But Hare expresses approval for the seventeenth-century court painter Simon Ushakov, whom he describes as “profoundly gifted and independent-minded” (36).  If it is a moot point as to why Ushakov’s independent minded approach might not have led to the despised “individual self-assertion,” Hare’s comments nevertheless reveal a dislike of experimentation. Here, the clash between Hare’s and Fry’s preferences becomes obvious. Hare was clear-sighted about the icon’s duality as both religious artifact and work of art, writing: “The icon somehow grew into the chief visible manifestation of Russian religious thought and feeling, which has survived ever since the Middle Ages. This factor alone, apart from their remote beauty, should impart to icons a unique historical interest” (25). He knew well that treating icons as art was a recent development. It had, he notes, brought a “gradual recognition of the bewildering variety, startling artistic inequality, but occasionally very high aesthetic value, of Russian religious painting” (25). The new “Russian connoisseurs” had “recognized in their subject a far-reaching and unexplored complexity” (26). Here he referenced Nikolai Likhachev and Fedor Buslaev (“Professor T. Buslaev”), probably due to his reliance on Kondakov’s text or Minns’s version of it.

Predictably, the “remote beauty” that captured Hare’s attention was the work of Andrei Rublev, which garnered his highest praise and features strikingly as the book’s frontispiece [fig. 12]. (It should be mentioned that the attribution of this particular icon to Rublev has recently been questioned.^[74]) In the early fifteenth century, Hare writes, Russian religious painting “moved towards an arabesque of gentle colour harmonies, reflecting the rhythms of a mystic contemplative style, increasingly remote from hard realities and nature.”^[75] Rublev, he asserts, had imbued the “Greek forms” he had inherited with “diaphanous purity and graceful inner rhythm, enhanced by an exquisite sense of colour.”^[76] These poetic turns of phrase seem to reflect Hare’s knowledge of the scholarship of Pavel Muratov, another Russian scholar whose name appears in the bibliography.^[77]

Hare illustrates works from the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the [Cathedral of the Novodevichy Convent, and Trinity-Sergius Lavra, along with icons from the former Riabushinsky, Likhachev, and Grigory and Mikhail Chirikov private collections. There are grainy images of murals, including wall paintings by Dionysius in the Ferapontov Monastery and details from the Annunciation Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin, the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod, the Cathedral of St. Dmitry in Vladimir. An image of the well-known Stroganov icon, Saint John the Warrior, by Prokopii Chirin, was probably from Hare’s copy of the abovementioned catalogue for the 1913 exhibition.^[78]

There are several illustrations of works in Western collections. For example, Hare thanks “Marjorie Merriweather Post May” for photographs.^[79] These included the attractive icons of the Mother of God “Pledge to Sufferers” (1795) and a seventeenth-century icon with scenes from the life of the Mother of God [fig. 13].^[80] Other works from Western collections include a seventeenth-century Trinity icon from the Walters Art Gallery, shown as an example of “elaborately decorative” work of the Yaroslavl school.^[81] Besides the icons in Chapter 1, other sections of the book include ecclesiastical art. For example, the chapter on silver includes discussion of a sixteenth-century Gospel cover in the Kirill-Beloozerskii monastery. Although the extent of Hare’s on-site research in Russia remains unclear, the images of works in situ suggest he had a wide knowledge of key sites and icon chronology. In sum, Hare’s skillful interweaving of sources from East and West with pieces from his own collection and his selection of illustrations to support his mainly chronological approach show a firm grounding in the topic.

Hare’s book seems to have been well received in British art circles. Highlighting the rise of interest in Russian icons, art historian Mary Chamot claimed, in 1967, that “post-war interest in the arts of Russia has been confined mainly to icon painting.”^[82] Chamot remarked that the recent opening of museums dedicated to icons in Recklinghausen, Germany, and Kölliken, Switzerland, bore witness to this trend, and she emphasized a lack of literature on icons in English: “A new book, lavishly got up, is to be welcomed.”^[83] She added: “Hare writes . . . with an understanding of [the icon’s] purpose ‘to represent what belonged to a separate spiritual world’ without ‘renouncing the basic physical and natural forms of life . . . The latter were deliberately stylized or adapted, to fulfil strict ecclesiastical requirements, and make the physical elements serve as a proper vehicle for conveying pure religious feelings.’” But she noticed a bias towards illustrating “later, more realistic icons.” (405). She thus recognized Hare’s approach of tackling icon history as a linear chronology that ran from Byzantium to nineteenth-century realism, a strategy that also had the benefit of positioning his own collection of mainly late icons in a positive light. Additionally, Chamot criticized Hare’s failure to mention the work of the State Restoration Workshops in Moscow or the recent exhibitions of restored icons in Russian museums: “Unfortunately some of the plates are reproduced from old photographs, before cleaning, and the present location of later paintings is not always correctly indicated.” (405).

Chamot thought that “by far the most original and useful chapters” were those on the decorative arts (406). As this praise suggests, Hare’s approach perpetuated a long-held British bias towards interpreting Russian art through the lens of the decorative arts that had begun with Maskell’s Russian Art and Art Objects. With the émigré marketplace for Russian art and antiques flourishing in the mid-twentieth century, this was another area rich for contemporary collectors. For Hare personally, Russian silver was another key area of interest. Silverware formed a large section of his collection, and he published on this topic too.^[84] Thus, it was likely not mere coincidence that many of his icons bore decorative rizas and oklads (see fig. 3).

Unlike Chamot, Hare was not a trained art historian, but he had researched both Western and Russian sources. Few were Soviet: most of the scholars Hare cites are Russian and from pre-Revolutionary and émigré circles; they include Aleksandr Anisimov, Nikodim Kondakov, Nikolai Likhachev, Pavel Muratov, Aleksandr I. Uspensky, Vladimir Lossky, and Leonid Uspensky. He names several scholars based in Germany too: Konrad Onasch, Vladimir [“W.”] Weidle [a Russian émigré], and Oskar Wulff. As to Western sources, Hare references British art historian David Talbot Rice’s short, forty-page primer, Russian Icons [fig. 14], published by Penguin in 1947. But he omits the more comprehensive text by Tamara Talbot Rice, Russian Icons, as well as her A Concise History of Russian Art and Russian Art, all of which came out in 1963, two years before his book.^[85] Perhaps he viewed them as competition or perhaps his research was executed piecemeal. Other important works of twentieth-century Western scholarship are missing too, such as Fannina Halle’s Altrussische Kunst (Old Russian Art, 1920) and Réau’s L’art russe (Russian Art, 1921).^[86]

Records of Hare’s contacts and travels are practically nonexistent, and the suggestions that follow are speculative. For instance, might he have traveled to Prague to visit the Seminarium Kondakovianum?^[87] It is possible, but Hare probably met Andreyev in Cambridge, since the exiled scholar was already there by 1948. Did Hare know Minns, also at Cambridge? While a Prague connection is impossible to confirm, it seems almost certain that Hare knew collectors in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, either personally or indirectly. His articles on icons for The Connoisseur indicate his knowledge of the collections of Siegfried Amberg-Herzog (1924–2002) at Kölliken and Martin Winkler (1893–1982) and Heinrich Wendt (1901–56) at Recklinghausen.^[88] Hare’s research and contacts show gaps, however. Some important mid-twentieth-century collections that he does not mention are: the Olof Aschberg collection of 245 icons, which the National Museum of Sweden in Stockholm purchased in 1933; the much smaller Allen collection at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, which was purchased in 1968 but assembled earlier; and the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.^[89] Such projects bear comparison with Hare’s own, so the omissions are surprising and especially so in the case of Allen, given Hare’s personal connections to Ireland.

Perhaps the most interesting link with other collectors is the fact that the German version of Hare’s book was published by the Aurel Bongers Press in Recklinghausen. Apart from slight alterations to design, this publication was no different from the English version, and it is unclear why it came out a year earlier.^[90] What is intriguing is that the press had a strong relationship with the Recklinghausen Museum of Icons. When the latter was founded in 1956, its home was the building used by the publisher, which began to produce art books on icons in collaboration with the museum.^[91] Hare evidently knew people there, and perhaps his book was linked to a museum exhibition, or he had heard of the new collaboration when looking for a publisher. The museum was founded by the director of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, the painter Thomas Grochowiak (1914–2012), after a successful exhibition of icons at the Kunsthalle.^[92] It assembled for permanent display seventy-three icons from the collections of Winkler and Wendt, who were the most significant collectors of icons in Germany at the time.^[93] 

Hare’s collection was comparable in size to the founding collection at Recklinghausen, and although he may not have known the donors themselves, he likely did know the museum’s director, Heinz Skrobucha. In the 1964 issue of The Connoisseur, Hare reviewed Skrobucha’s Meisterwerke der Ikonenmalerei (Masterpieces of Icon Painting), also published by Aurel Bongers, praising this “much-needed short survey of the complicated history of icon painting.”^[94] He noted that Skrobucha had reproduced, for the first time, icons from the collections of Amberg, George Hann, and “Professor Martin Winkler in Munich.” The comment reveals Hare’s awareness of some key players in the icon community. There was, it seems, an international group of connoisseurs who wished to raise the status of icon scholarship and collecting. Also in 1964, Hare reviewed Konrad Onasch’s Ikonen (1963), enthusing about this “most welcome addition to the very scanty literature in English devoted to the study of Russian icons.”^[95] He congratulated the author for including several illustrations of work by Ushakov, whom “purists could never forgive for his departure from the old theological canons,” as well as some later eighteenth-century icons.^[96] But he criticized Onasch’s separation of the text from the illustrations, the lack of captions, and the failure to tackle key issues, such as the retouching of original icons during restoration.

Hare’s status as one of the very few British writers on Russian art during Soviet times must surely also have led to contact with Byzantine art specialists and enthusiasts within the scholarly and museum communities. It is helpful to compare his writing to that of two scholars whose work in promoting the cause of Russian art in twentieth-century Britain remains under-researched: the Byzantine art specialists David Talbot Rice (1903–1972) and his wife, Tamara Talbot Rice (née Elena Abelson, 1904–1993).^[97]

Born in Gloucestershire in 1903, David Talbot Rice, like Hare, had a conventional upper-class education, in this case at Eton College followed by Oxford University. He had a somewhat similar role to Hare during the Second World War, working with the Intelligence Directorate of the War Office, ultimately becoming head of its Near East section. Talbot Rice then became a renowned specialist on Byzantium and wrote many works on Byzantine and Islamic art.^[98] This interest was fostered by extensive travel in the Near East, and in 1932, Talbot Rice was appointed lecturer in Byzantine and Near Eastern Art at the recently founded Courtauld Institute of Art in London. After two years, he gained a professorship at Edinburgh University, which he held for most of his career.

Besides his book Russian Icons, published in 1947 for the King Penguin series, Talbot Rice’s publications on Byzantine art occasionally featured Russian work.^[99] Although there is no discussion of icons made in Russia, Art of the Byzantine Era mentions Byzantine art objects and icons located at the Pushkin Museum, the State Hermitage Museum, and the State Tretyakov Gallery. Clearly, Talbot Rice was well versed with the contents of Soviet museums.^[100] Churches and frescos in Georgia and Armenia are also discussed. Additionally, Talbot Rice had been involved in Russian icon projects in Britain: he was a member of the Executive Committee for the Russian Art Exhibition of 1935, and, within this, was part of a more narrowly constituted selection committee. Around the time of the exhibition, he wrote an essay for The Burlington Magazine in which he questioned Anisimov’s view on the origins of Russian icon painting; he wished to stress that there were ongoing relations between Constantinople and Kyiv.^[101] Also, in autumn 1937, Talbot Rice gave an invited lecture on the beginnings of Russian icon painting as part of the prestigious series of Ilchester lectures on Polish and Slavonic history and culture at Oxford University’s Taylor Institution.^[102]

Another interesting commonality was that both Hare and Talbot Rice married women who were émigrés from the Russian Empire. It is possible that their wives might have nudged their interests in the direction of Russian cultural history; both their respective spouses may have assisted in their research, too, despite having careers of their own. Talbot Rice married Tamara Abelson in 1927 after meeting her at university. But unlike the artist and sculptor Gordine, Abelson pursued a career as an academic and author. Although she had trained as a Byzantine specialist, she leaned toward writing works for the general reader and published a long list of books under her married name, many of them on Russian history. Her Russian Icons, first published in 1957, was so successful that it went to several reprints.^[103] And her interests in Russia ranged more widely than those of her husband, including the Scythians, Empress Elizabeth, and the events of the twentieth century.^[104] Tamara Talbot Rice’s A Concise History of Russian Art remains a rare introduction to the subject that, although its approaches would be questioned by contemporary scholars, has not been superseded by later publications.^[105] The Talbot Rices also collaborated on many projects, including the 1935 Russian Art Exhibition, an exhibition and catalogue of the Allen collection, and a book on icon dating.^[106]

By comparison with the Talbot Rices, then, whose scholarship on the Russian icon was informed by a far broader engagement with Byzantine art, Hare’s publications seem almost to be the result of a connoisseurly enthusiasm that had developed into an academic sideline. And in terms of Russian art historiography, his modest output hardly bears comparison with the long list of publications by Tamara Talbot Rice. But, whatever differences one might draw between them in terms of their contributions to scholarship, this trio of writers created a body of new British art writing on Russian icons, and Russian art more generally, which greatly influenced the next generation of historians. In the work of all three, it is possible to trace a line back to the interests and scholarship of Maskell, Fry, Conway, and others.

The purpose of this essay has been not only to assess Hare’s own collecting activity as it concerned Russian icons but also to position his interest within a broader context of British interest in Russian art in the twentieth century—a topic that is ripe for further scholarly investigation. Although, as noted, much of the primary evidence of Hare’s work is lost, I have argued that Hare’s engagement with Russian icons should be seen as consistent with the rise of interest in Byzantine art in the West during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A growing British awareness of Russian art more broadly was linked with these developments, as revealed by a brief comparison with the work of the Talbot Rices. The publications of the Talbot Rices and Hare can be credited with making Russian art more widely known in Britain. For Hare specifically, writing a survey text on this topic was also entirely consistent with his wish that his and Gordine’s own collection would become the starting point for a Russian art museum in Britain. Hare can be seen as a pioneer who broke out on his own with assembling his collection, since his decision to acquire later icons went against the main voices of the twentieth-century art world, including critics like Fry and historians like the Talbot Rices. With his combined collecting and writing, notably transcending the academic setting, Hare was able to support emerging Western connoisseurship as well as wider public interest in Russian artistic culture. As a mediator, then, he can also be compared with the English musicologist Rosa Newmarch, whose books The Russian Opera (1914) and The Russian Arts (1916) were early examples of introductory primers on Russia for British readers.^[107] Like Newmarch, Hare fits best in the role of cultural educator. To conclude, regardless of the quality of his own icon collection or his scholarship, Hare’s pioneering work bears witness to a new Western perception of icons as art during the Soviet period. Accordingly, while the remaining collection in the Dorich House Museum is small, bound with its history lies a larger untold story of Anglo-Soviet cultural relations that brings fresh insights into the long history of British-Russian artistic exchange.