Oil and Old Masters: Calouste Gulbenkian as collector and oil titan
Oil and Old Masters: Calouste Gulbenkian as collector and oil titan
Lecturer: Professor Jonathan Conlin
The Gulbenkian Museum is Lisbon’s finest museum, yet the man behind this collection, Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), known as “Mr Five Per Cent” on account of his personal holding of five per cent of Middle East oil production, was an enigmatic and publicity-shy figure, about whom little was known.
This talk by the author of the definitive biography of Gulbenkian weaves together the history of a great European collection (featuring Rembrandts bought from The Hermitage, as well as Lalique glass, carpets, Iznik ware and Renaissance paintings) with that of the emergence of the modern oil industry.
Professor Jonathan Conlin is a cultural historian of modern Britain and Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. His books include Tales of Two Cities (2014), a comparative history of Paris and London, and biographies of Adam Smith and the Anglo-Armenian oil baron Calouste Gulbenkian.
Born in New York, he studied History and Modern Languages at Oxford, subsequently moving to the Courtauld Institute and Cambridge for his MA and PhD. Earlier this year he was commissioned by the National Gallery to write its bicentenary history. All his talks draw on his own archival research, allowing him to give audiences insights into how historians approach different kinds of evidence, the gaps and dead-ends as well as the surprise discoveries.