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 1865 -
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| Name |
Robert Langton Douglas [1] |
| Born |
1865 |
Davenham, CHS, England, UK  [1] |
| Gender |
Male |
| Reference Number |
5462 |
| Died |
Y [1] |
| Person ID |
I5462 |
aojd |
| Last Modified |
11 Nov 2011 |
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| Notes |
- From Margaret Salinger's "Dream Catcher": Claire went to Italy, to be with her dying father. It did not come as a surprise to anyone who knew her father that old age finally caught up with Robert Langdon Douglas, or RLD as he was called by friends. He was nearly seventy when Claire, the last of his fifteen or so children, was born in 1933. Baron's "Knights and Peerage" records nine of them. By the time she can remember him, he was suffering from senile dementia. She told me once, at an age when I, too, would have "died" of embarrassment, that in the middle of a formal dinner party at their home in London, he boomed across the table in his plummy churchman's voice, "Claire, have you moved your bowels today?" RLD's final years were characterized by similar occurrences of progressive unpredictability; however, his decision to repair to Italy to spend his last days rather than to the Black Douglas Clan's lair in Scotland was well considered. Two divergent paths of his long life led him, at the end, to San Girolamo, a convent and nursing home for retired clergy, high in the hills above Florence. He had been an Anglican priest and had had a parish in Oxford, England, for a time. Several wives and even more offspring later, it was thought best that he find some other mode of employment, and he began his second, highly successful career as an art dealer and historian. "Your grandfather," I've been told, "was largely responsible for putting the early Italian Masters, especially the Sienese, back on the map." He wrote a lovely book on Fra Angelico, and though RLD was dead long before I was born, I used to take great comfort falling asleep beneath Giotto's dark-skinned "Madonna and Child" when, as a young girl, I visited my grandmother in New York. Perhaps RLD did, too; toward the end of his life he converted to Catholicism. When he died, he was awarded a hero's funeral in Siena, where he is entombed in a great wall. My mother said the whole city turned out in medieval procession that day, with costumes, trumpets, and pageantry, to pay homage to the man who, through his work, had restored such honor to their city. My mother gave me his funeral proclamation by the city of Siena, a two-foot-by-three-foot document worthy of an honorary Italian. [1]
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