Christopher Monkhouse, colourful US museum curator in love with British art and design – obituary

Christopher Monkhouse, who has died aged 73, was a colourful and much-loved American museum curator and collector whose taste for architecture and decorative arts took shape while studying in England.

To the end, in matters technological, he was pre-digital: no cellphone, no email, yet immaculately dressed in suit and neat bow tie.

He was born in Portland, Maine, on April 2 1947. Both his parents and brothers were collectors, and as a student at Deerfield Academy Christopher curated his first museum exhibition, in 1965 , on James Wells Champney, noted for his portraits, oriental scenes and American landscapes.

Monkhouse first came to England aged 19 to study at the Attingham Summer School in 1966, the passe-partout for generations of young American museum curators. There he formed lifelong friendships with Morrison Heckscher (now a curator emeritus of the Met in New York) and the ebullient John Hardy of the V & A woodwork department.

Attingham was three gloriously intense weeks of visits, notably two days at Chatsworth where the Duchess of Devonshire, Debo, allowed free rein through the house. Students prayed that the last lecture would end in time for them to get to the pub at the end of Attingham’s long drive.

Monkhouse was so enamoured by England that after completing a fine art degree he secured, in 1970, a Thouron Award to study at the Courtauld Institute in London, where he moved on from an MA thesis on British Railway Hotels to a doctoral thesis on Grand Hotels under Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (never completed).

An internship with Desmond Fitzgerald, The Knight of Glin, in the furniture and woodwork department at the V&A followed.

Monkhouse became a familiar of the Victorian Society, the Irish Georgian Society, SAVE, and a contributor to Country Life. He looked set to live in London forever but found himself propelled back to America by Country Life’s architectural editor John Cornforth, who took a keen interest in directing young colleagues on their careers. Monkhouse had so much luggage, including a fabulous Bugatti chair, that he had to return by sea.

Over the next 40 years he worked in the decorative arts and architectural departments of four major American museums – in Providence, Pittsburg, Minneapolis, and Chicago.

At the excellent museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, he enriched collections and published catalogues while welcoming British and Irish friends, taking them to visit the famous millionaire mansions of Newport.

Next he was recruited by Drue Heinz (who was, with her husband Jack, a famous donor to museums) to launch a successor to the Heinz Gallery in Portland Square in London (the creation of the brilliant John Harris). Situated in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and aided by a generous acquisitions budget Monkhouse amassed a hoard of superb architectural drawings.

Monkhouse next moved boldly to the Midwest as Curator of Architecture Design and Decorative Arts at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. There he had the good fortune to acquire a remarkable 1962 house by the great Modernist architect Marcel Breuer.

All this time Monkhouse was making visits back to England to keep friendships alive, entertaining at the Garrick and Reform clubs (reciprocals with his New York Club, the Century Association) while having English and Irish friends to stay at his summer house on the seashore in northernmost Maine, where they endured outdoor showers and feasted on lobsters.

Next came the crowning job of his career as curator of decorative arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. Here he secured a stunning series of acquisitions. One was an 11 ft-tall gilt Pugin chandelier; others were the padouk wood and ivory Brand cabinet designed by Horace Walpole and the 1782 library ladder from Badminton House in Chinese Chippendale style.

Monkhouse’s moment of greatest glory in Chicago came with his ambitious exhibition Ireland, Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690-1840, using loans almost exclusively from American collections to highlight the best in Irish Georgian art and design. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, making it a major diplomatic coup.

Monkhouse had planned a golden retirement. He had bought a stately sea-captain’s house of the 1850s in the university town of Brunswick, Maine, filling it with his books and drawings and comfortable bedrooms for his many friends. A life of travel and entertaining lay ahead but, alas, he died suddenly of a stroke.

Christopher Monkhouse, born April 2 1947, died January 12 2021