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Linda Murray

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Linda Murray
Linda Murray, née Bramley, was born in Kent in 1913 and died in Farmoor (near Oxford) in 2004.

A Renaissance scholar, she was the daughter of J. F. Bramley, an exporter, and Hélène Marie Blanche Manso di Villa. She was educated principally by her mother, preferring to travel with them rather than attend boarding school. French and English were her native tongues; she rapidly learned Spanish and Italian. She studied painting at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. During World War II Bramley worked for the U.S. High Command in London where her skill as an artist was put to work drawing maps of the damage from bombing raids on the continent. She moved to Eisenhower’s staff engaged in intelligence. After the war she entered the Courtauld Institute where her classmates included Oliver Millar (q.v.) and Peter Murray (q.v.). She married Murray in 1947. As Linda Murray, she began teaching in London University’s department of extramural studies in 1949. Although she taught a variety of subjects, her medieval architecture classes and tours were especially popular. In 1952 she and her husband, now a lecturer at the Courtauld, channeled their pedagogical energies into two support works of art history, a translation, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, by Heinrich Wölfflin (q.v.), and the Dictionary of Art and Artists. The Dictionary established their collaborative working method: dividing the research and write up between them and then passing it to the other for revision. The Dictionary was an immediate success and pair became the most famous "art history couple" in the modern age...

Read more via the Dictionary of Art Historians.

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