SCULPTURE IN BRITAIN: 1530 – 1830 (Signed, plus letter)

Signed by author. With signed inscription on front blank and letter of grattitude from Margaret Whitney dated 1st June 1964, Courtauld Institute of Art, to RUPERT GUNNIS and Gunnis’s book plate. Rupert Gunnis:

Born in Cadogan Square, London, Gunnis was educated at Eton College. In 1923 he entered the Colonial Service, serving as private secretary to the Governor of Uganda (1923–6) and then the Governor of Cyprus (1926–32). From 1932 to 1935 he worked as Inspector of Antiquities for the Cyprus Museum, publishing Historic Cyprus in 1936.

Returning to England in 1939, Gunnis inherited a large fortune with which he settled at Hungershall Lodge with his Turkish Cypriot life partner Namuk Kemal in Tunbridge Wells and pursued his antiquarian interests. Around 1942 he began compiling an index of monumental sculptors: this may have originally been intended for inclusion in Katherine Esdaile’s projected ‘Dictionary of British Sculptors’, and after her death in 1950 he published his Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851 (completed in 1951 and published in 1953[1][2]; 2nd ed. 1968). An expanded third edition was published in 2009 by Ingrid Roscoe and a team of scholars at the Henry Moore Institute. pp. xxii, 314

Rupert Gunnis died, aged 66, at Stratfield Saye, the Duke of Wellington’s estate halfway between Reading and Basingstoke. He is buried in the Streatfeild Mausoleum in Chiddingstone churchyard, Kent