Sidney Colvin

Sir Sidney Colvin (18 June 1845 – 11 May 1927) was a British curator and literary and art critic, part of the illustrious Anglo-Indian Colvin family. He is primarily remembered for his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson. Family and early life He was born on 18 June 1845 in West Norwood, in what is now London, at St. John's Lodge on Knight's Hill, a nine bedroom, twenty-one acre estate, to Bazett David Colvin, an East India merchant, and Mary Steuart, daughter of William Butterworth Bayley, Chairman of the East India Company Both sides of his family were connected to British India, his father as a partner in the trading company of Crawford, Colvin, and Co., with offices in Calcutta and London. (This connected the family with Robert Wigram Crawford, the Whig politician.) His uncle John Russell Colvin, lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces during the mutiny of 1857, gave him ten cousins, including the lawyer Walter Mytton and Auckland, also lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces (and Oudh). Colvin's childhood was spent at The Grove, Little Bealings, Suffolk, as Bazett David inherited the estate in 1847 from his father James. The house and estate had literary and artistic connections: James had purchased it in 1824 from Perry Nursey, the landscape painter and teacher of Thomas Churchyard; Nursey had often entertained David Wilkie RA at Little Bealings, and was friends with Edward Fitzgerald, translator of The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam. Education and career A scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, Colvin became a fellow of his college in 1868. In 1873 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art, and was appointed in the next year to the directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum.