Charles Holme
Charles Holme was an English journalist and art critic, founding editor of The [Studio (magazine)|The Studio] from 1893. He published a series of books promoting peasant art in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Life
Holme was born on 7 October 1848 in Derby, the younger son of a silk manufacturer, George Holme, and his wife Ann, née Brentnall. Holme himself worked in the silk and wool trades, trading with Turkestan, India and China in the 1870s. He subsequently opened offices in Japan, visiting the country in 1889 with the painter Alfred East and Arthur Lasenby Liberty and his wife. He was vice-president of the Japan Society of the United Kingdom, and was a recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun in 1902. He was a member of a private bibliophile club, the Sette of Odd Volumes, and became president thereof in 1890. He was painted by Philip Alexius de László in 1908; the portrait was published in The Studio in 1911.
He died on 14 March 1923 in Upton Grey, in Hampshire.
''The Studio''
Following his retirement from trade in 1892, Holme started The Studio: an illustrated magazine of fine and applied art, a magazine dedicated to fine arts and decorative arts, giving roughly equal weight to each. The first issue appeared in April 1893. The first serving editor was Joseph Gleeson White. In 1895 Holme took over as editor himself, although Gleeson White continued to contribute. Holme retired as editor in 1919 for reasons of health, and was succeeded by his son Charles Geoffrey Holme, who was already the editor of special numbers and year-books of the magazine.
Edited works
Special numbers of The Studio were edited by Holme for separate publication as books.Corot and Millet; with critical essays by Gustave Geffroy & Arsène Alexandre, 1902Daumier and Gavarni by Henri Frantz and Octave Uzanne, 1904Peasant art in Italy by S. J. A. Churchill, V. Balzano and Elisa Ricci, 1905The gardens of England in the southern & western counties, 1907Art in England during the Elizabethan and Stuart periods by Aymer Vallance, 1908Old English mezzotints by Malcolm Salaman, 1910Peasant art in Sweden, Lapland and Iceland by Sten Granlund and Jarno Jessen, 1910Peasant art in Austria and Hungary by A. S. Levetus, Dr. Haberlandt and Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch, 1911Peasant art in Russia, 1912Old houses in Holland by Sydney R. Jones, 1913The great painter-etchers from Rembrandt to Whistler by Malcolm Salaman, 1914The art of the book; a review of some recent European and American work in typography, page decoration & binding, 1914Shakespeare in pictorial art by Malcolm Salaman, 1916The development of British landscape painting in water-colours by Alexander Joseph Finberg and E. A. Taylor, 1918.