Ludwig Burchard was born in 1886 in Mainz, Germany to a German father and a German-Jewish mother, studying art history and philology, graduating in 1917 with a doctorate thesis on Dutch etchers of the pre-Rembrandt era. A prominent Rubens' scholar and cataloguer, Burchard fled Nazi Germany in 1935, settling permanently in England and growing his archive of Rubens-related materials, as well as organising several seminal postwar Rubens' exhibitions in England and Belgium. Following Burchard's death, his archive was donated to Rubenianum in Antwerp, where the publication of the complete catalogue raisonné of Rubens' works in twenty-nine parts, <em>Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard</em>, has been underway since 1968.
Art historian Ludwig Burchard was born in 1886 in Mainz, Germany to a German father and a German Jewish mother and attended school in Karlsruhe. He subsequently studied philology and art history at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg and Halle-Wittenberg, graduating from the latter in 1917 with a doctorate thesis on Dutch etchers of the pre-Rembrandt era, written under Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944). In 1911–12 Burchard volunteered at the Kupferstich-Kabinetts [The Print Rooms] in Dresden and Berlin, earning the praise of Director General of Prussian museums Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929). During the First World War Burchard served in the field artillery. Postwar he worked as an editor of the renowned Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon dictionary, better known as Thieme-Becker, in Leipzig and was a staff member for the periodical Kunstchronik. In 1921 Burchard moved to Berlin as the editor of Zeitschrift für bildenden Kunst. The same year he completed a volume on Peter Paul Rubens in the Klassiker der Kunst series left incomplete by the premature death of Rudolf Oldenbourg (1887–1921). Shortly thereafter Gustav Glück (1871–1952), Director of the Gemäldegalerie, Vienna, approached him to assist in the publication of Rubens’s catalogue raisonné. Burchard set to work and became a diligent gatherer of information, source material, photographs and personal notes on the artist, with the Rubens catalogue eventually becoming his life’s work.
The rise of Nazism in Germany forced Burchard, who, although Protestant, had a Jewish mother, to flee to England in 1935. Having escaped with his archive of Rubens-related materials, Burchard commenced the process of preparing the catalogue raisonné, engaging a number of fellow refugees into the project, including art historian Fritz Grossmann (1902–1984). Having started financially supporting Burchard's work on Rubens prior to emigration, another fellow refugee, art historian and collector, Count Antoine Seilern (1901–1978), continued supporting the scholar’s work in England. In 1939 Burchard published a prospectus of his upcoming catalogue, The Work of Peter Paul Rubens, then projected to consist of six volumes. However, the outbreak of the Second World War and Burchard's internment as an 'enemy alien' on the Isle of Man in 1940 delayed his plans. Postwar, many Rubens paintings were destroyed or disappeared and others changed hands, making Burchard's pre-war research partially obsolete, further delaying the cataloguing project.
In 1950 and 1951 Burchard helped organise two exhibitions of works by Rubens at Wildenstein & Co Gallery, London and at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1952. In 1955 he conducted a seminar on Rubens for the annual Belgian Art Seminar, established four years prior by Herman Liebaers (1919–2010), Director of the Royal Library of Belgium. The following year Burchard expanded this to an exhibition of Rubens' drawings at Rubenshuis, the artist's home in Antwerp. The exhibition catalogue, co-written with Roger d'Hulst, was expanded in 1963 and remains one of the most important monographs on the topic. Burchard died in London in 1960. Art critic Denys Sutton, author of the obituary on Burchard published in The Times, wrote: 'Ludwig Burchard […] was one of the most gifted and discriminating connoisseurs of his generation […] A witty and stimulating conversationalist, he was ever ready to share his knowledge. To hear him discourse on the sketch in art, Manet's technique, the influence of the antique on Rubens or the colour values of his favourite artists or to see him handle Italian Renaissance bronze or a T'ang pot was an unforgettable experience' (5 October 1960, p. 15). Following Burchard's death, his archive, consisting of 800 boxes of photographs and notes and approximately 7000 books, was acquired by the Kunsthistorisches Museum to form the core of the Rubenianum, a documentation centre for the study of Rubens and 16th- and 17th-century Flemish art, housed in Kolveniersstraat, Antwerp. The city of Antwerp made an agreement with Burchard's heirs and the Nationaal Centrum voor de Plastische Kunsten van de 16de en de 17de Eeuw (currently the Centrum voor de Vlaamse kunst van de 16de en 17de eeuw), chaired by d'Hulst, to edit and produce a catalogue raisonné on Rubens based on Burchard's materials, published as the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. The project, embarked on in 1968 and set for completion in 2023, will altogether consist of 29 parts.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ludwig Burchard]
Publications related to [Ludwig Burchard] in the Ben Uri Library