Julius S. Held (1905–2002)

Julius S. Held was born to a Jewish family in Mosbach, Germany. His parents Nannette (Seligmann) and Adolf Held ran a clothing store. He received his arbitur in 1923 and attended the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Vienna. He earned his doctoral degree from the University of Freiburg in 1930 with a dissertation on Albrecht Dürer. He worked as an assistant to Frederick Antal, one of his professors, and at the Berlin Museum under Max J. Friedländer. After the Nazi regime came to power in Germany in 1933, Held was dismissed from his position and fled to the USA in 1934. In 1936, he married Ingrid-Marta Nordin-Petterson, a Swedish art conservator, with whom he had two children. The following year, Held became a lecturer in art history at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City, rising to full professor in 1954, a position he held until his retirement in 1971. He became a visiting professor at Williams College and at its Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Held was renowned for his scholarship in 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art, and wrote numerous books, essays, and articles. At age 75, he published what many considered a landmark work, his two volume Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens (1980). Held's collection of rare and antique books, most of them acquired for their illustrations, is now in the Clark Library. He donated more than 200 of his collection of more than 1,000 master drawings to the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, DC in 1984. In 1988, he was instrumental in creating a memorial to the Kristallnacht destruction of his boyhood synagogue in Mosbach.