Art History Scholar Dies

Henricus “Harrie” Vanderstappen, long time art history professor at the prestigious University of Chicago, died a month ago at the age of 86.

He was a war refugee, Catholic priest, China missionary, art scholar, a popular teacher, and world class authority on Asian art. The university newspaper, Chicago Chronicle, has the details of his eventful life.

Born in The Netherlands, Vanderstappen barely escaped imprisonment by the Nazis while a seminary student. "At one point during the war, he narrowly escaped capture by the Nazis, hiding with his seminary classmates in a windowless basement for more than 100 days," the Chronicle reports.

After the war he became a Catholic priest and in 1947 was assigned to do missionary work in Beijing.

[T]he art department of Fu Jen Catholic University needed someone to teach art. Vanderstappen obliged. “What I had in mind was missionary work,” he said, years later of this experience. “Instead I was converted —to art.”

Expelled with other foreigners after the Communist Revolution, he enrolled as an art history student at the U of Chicago and earned a Ph.D in 1955, writing his dissertation on art of the Ming period (1368-1644)

Vanderstappen then taught at universities in Germany and Japan before being invited to join the Chicago faculty in 1959. There, he is credited with reviving and completing --

Chinese scholar T.L. Yuan’s effort to catalogue every single piece of Western writing on the art of China. The culmination of this exhaustive project, T.L. Yuan Bibliography of Chinese Art and Architecture," was published in 1975.

After his retirement, the University of Chicago established the Harrie H. Vandertappen Distinguished Professorship in art history, a post currently held by Prof. Wu Hung.