Clovis Whitfield
Clovis Whitfield is an art historian and art dealer based in London, where he runs Whitfield Fine Art. He is a member of the Society of London Art Dealers.
Career as art historian
Educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and then the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He was later a visiting Professor at Indiana University, 1967/1968. In the course of his career, Whitfield has organised art exhibitions and lectured at important museums around the world, including the Royal Academy, London and the Capitoline Museums Rome.
Whitfield has published on Baroque Art extensively since 1971, notably discovering Temps Calme by Nicolas Poussin in The Burlington Magazine in 1977 and organising and writing the catalogue of Painting in Naples 1606 – 1705, Caravaggio to Giordano held at the Royal Academy in 1982. He published 'Caravaggio's Eye' (Paul Holberton publishing) in 2011, an important study of the Italian artist Caravaggio and his use of the technology of his day.
As well as being the author of a number of books on art history, throughout his career he has been credited with identifications of several "lost" works by Baroque and Renaissance painters, including a disputed identification of Apollo the Luteplayer by Caravaggio and Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist by Andrea del Sarto. In 2007 Whitfield's gallery removed a loan of paintings from the New York gallery Salander-O'Reilly a few hours before the opening of a major exhibition of old master paintings, due to concerns over the "uncertain legal situation" confronting the New York gallery.
