Anna Amadea Leonie Forsdyke

Lady Anna Amadea Leonie Forsdyke
File:Forsdyke, Anna Amadea Leonie.jpg
Born	1905
Died	1994
Residence	British Museum, WC1 [1949]
Occupation	music
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow elected_AI 1942.03.24

Notes

House Notes

violinist

Notes From Elsewhere

The violinist Anna Amadea Leonie (Dea) Gombrich was the sister of the art historian Ernst Gombrich. She was born in Vienna, where Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg were friends of the family. She emigrated to England in 1936 and married Sir John Forsdyke, the director of the BM
Forsdyke, [Edgar] John, Sir
Date born: 1883
Place born: Bermondsey, London, United Kingdom
Date died: 1979
Place died: Golders Green, London, United Kingdom
Director, British Museum, 1936-1950, and scholar of the prehistoric era. Forsdyke was son of Frederick Palmer Forsdyke and Mary Eliza Sainsbury. He was educated at Christ�s Hospital and Keble College, Oxford, graduating in 1906. A scholar of classical studies, he joined the British Museum in 1908 as an assistant in the department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. In 1910 he married a forty-two-year-old widow (he was twenty-six) Frances Beatrice Mumford Gifford. Forsdyke worked closely with Arthur Evans (q.v.), contributing to Evans� work the Palace of Minos. He edited the Journal of Hellenic Studies between 1912 to 1923. He served in the Royal Artillery during World War I 1914-1919, in France, Macedonia, and Spain. After the war, his major work, a catalog of the Aegean pottery appeared in 1925. He and Henry Beauchamp Walters (q.v.) wrote three fascicules of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum the same year. At the suggestion of Arthur Evans, he was sent to Crete to finish excavating the cemetery near Knossos in 1927. In 1932 he was made Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. As keeper, he dealt with Joseph Duveen (1869-1939), the difficult donor of the new wing to house the Elgin marbles. When Sir George Hill (q.v.) retired as Director and Principal Librarian in 1936, Forsdyke was appointed his replacement. The following year he was knighted. Duveen pressured some museum official to "clean" the marbles. Though Forsdyke discovered and prevented further damage, the incident hung over the museum and damaged his reputation. A similar "cleaning" had also occurred at the National Gallery. As tensions with Nazi Germany made it clear the war was inevitable, Forsdyke developed the evacuation plan for the treasures of the museum. His able administrative skills are credited with saving many of the museum�s objects during a time when labor, adequate storage and time were in low supply. The Duveen gallery and parts of the Library were destroyed in the Blitz. Following his first wife's death in the 1930s, he married Anna Amadea Leonie �Dea� Gombrich (1905-1994) in 1942, the sister of Ernst Gombrich (q.v.). After the war, Forsdyke invested heavily in microfilming the collection, not so much as a preservation tool, but as outreach to the broader scholarly community. He retired in 1951. He died at home of bronchitis exacerbated by heart disease.
Neither a notable scholar nor an easy man to get along with, he is principally known for his war-time saving of the British Museum.

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