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Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September, 1907 – 26 March, 1983) was an English art historian and the "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union during the Cold War and earlier.
Life and times
He was born in Bournemouth, where his father had been a vicar. He initially studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge,but switched to Modern Languages after his first year, graduating in 1930, and became a teacher of French. He became a Fellow of the college in 1932, and, in 1965 was Slade Professor of Fine Art in Cambridge. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society which at that time was Marxist, formed from members of Cambridge University. He was also a homosexual and close aide of Guy Burgess, and it is said he seduced the poet Julian Bell.
After visiting Russia in 1933, he was in 1934 recruited by the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB). He joined the British Army in 1939 and in 1940 was recruited to MI5, the military intelligence department, where he had access to Ultra intelligence from decrypted Enigma messages. After the war he became director (1947 - 1974) of the Courtauld Institute of Art. His students there included Brian Sewell and Nicholas Serota.
In 1945 Blunt became Surveyor of the King's Pictures, and retained the post under Queen Elizabeth II, for which work he was knighted in 1956. He retained the post until 1972. He was particularly knowledgeable on the works of Nicolas Poussin. Interested in architecture, he attended a summer school in Sicily in 1965; this led to a deep interest in Sicilian architecture, and in 1968 he wrote the only authoritative and in-depth book on Sicilian Baroque.
Blunt is frequently spoken of as a distant relative of Queen Mary (Mary of Teck), generally Prince Michael of Hesse is given as their common cousin, however the exact lineage is never produced. He was however demonstrably a cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the late Queen Mother, through his mother, Hilda V. Master, daughter of Gertrude Mosley-Master, the daughter of Frances Mary Smith, sister of Oswald Smith, father of Frances Dora Smith, mother of Claude George Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, father of Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, making Blunt and the Queen Mother third cousins, through the Smith family.
In 1963 MI5 learned of his espionage from an American, Michael Straight, whom he had recruited. Blunt confessed to MI5 on 23 April, 1964, but his spying career remained an official secret until he was publicly named by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979. His knighthood was immediately revoked, followed by his honorary fellowship of Trinity College. According to MI5 papers released in 2002, that agency had been told by writer Lady Moura Budberg in 1950 that Blunt was a member of the Communist Party, but the information was ignored.
He was the brother of writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and of numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt.
Blunt in fiction
A Question of Attribution was a play written by Alan Bennett about Blunt in the weeks before his public exposure as a spy, and his relationship with the Queen. After a successful run in London's West End, it was made into a television play directed by John Schlesinger and starring James Fox, Prunella Scales and Geoffrey Palmer. It was aired on the BBC in 1991. This play was seen as a companion to Bennett's 1983 television play about Guy Burgess, An Englishman Abroad.
The Untouchable, a 1997 novel by John Banville, is a roman à clef based largely on the life and character of Anthony Blunt; the novel's protagonist, Victor Maskell, is a loosely disguised Blunt. The book is both comical and poignant in its deconstruction of the importance of double agents in the Cold War - Maskell's revelations to the Russians largely involving information of little importance, or facts that shortly afterwards appeared in newspapers. The secrecy around his homosexual personal life is depicted as a balance to his role as a spy, and when homosexuality is legalised he loses a great deal of enjoyment of his double life.
Publications
- A. Blunt, François Mansart and the Origins of French Classical Architecture.
- A. Blunt, Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration.
- A. Blunt, Borromini.
- R. Beresford and A. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, 1953.
- Sicilian Baroque, 1968.
- A. Blunt, "Roman Baroque Architecture: the Other Side of the Medal," Art history, no. 1, 1980'', pp. 61-80 (includes bibliographical references).
- A. Blunt, "Rubens and architecture," Burlington magazine, 1977, 894, pp. 609-621.
- Anthony Blunt, Picasso's Guernica, Oxford University Press, 1969.
Bibliography
- Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason, 1979.
- Alan Bennett, A Question of Attribution (television play, 1991).
- Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Pan (UK), ISBN 0330367668.
- Michael Straight, After Long Silence: the Man Who Exposed Anthony Blunt Tells for the First Time the Story of the Cambridge Spy Network from the Inside, London Collins, 1983, ISBN 0002170019.
- John Banville, The Untouchable (novel), 1997.
- John Costello, Mask Of Treachery, London Collins, 1988, ISBN 0688044832.
External links
1907 births | 1983 deaths | Academics of the Courtauld Institute of Art | Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge | British architecture writers | British art historians | British communists | British curators | Lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people | Old Marlburians | Soviet spies | Bournemouth
Anthony Blunt | Anthony Blunt | אנטוני בלאנט | Anthony Blunt | Anthony Blunt
"Anthony Blunt"