Anthony Frederick Blunt was a leading British art historian. He was a member of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union. In 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, Blunt confessed to having been a spy. His confession, a closely guarded secret for years, was revealed publicly by Margaret Thatcher in November 1979.
About Anthony Blunt in brief
Anthony Frederick Blunt was a leading British art historian. He was a member of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. In 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, Blunt confessed to having been a spy. His confession, a closely guarded secret for years, was revealed publicly by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979. He was stripped of his knighthood immediately thereafter. Blunt claimed that Guy Burgess recruited him as a spy between 1935 and 1936. As a Cambridge don, he was recruited to the NKVD in 1936 and possibly recruited in 1934. He also worked for MI5 and also gave £100,000 to purchase the painting Elzar and Rebecca by Nicolas Pousin. The painting was sold by Blunt’s executors in 1985 for £100,.000 and is now in Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum. The historian Geoff Andrews writes that he was Recruited between 1936 and 1936 while his wife was on holiday in France. He is remembered by historian John Edward Bowle, a year ahead of Blunt at Marlborough, as ‘an intellectual prig, too preoccupied with the realm of ideas’ and ‘a rather prissy, cold-blooded, academic puritanism’ Blunt won a scholarship in mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge. He spent four years at Trinity and switched to Modern Languages, eventually graduating in 1930 with a first class degree. He taught French at Cambridge and became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1932.
His graduate research was in French art history and he travelled frequently to continental Europe in connection with his studies. He became a fourth cousin once removed of Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley 6th Baronet of Ancoat, leader of the British Union of Fascists, both being descended from John Parker Mosley. Blunt’s father, a vicar, was assigned to Paris with the British embassy chapel, and moved his family to the French capital for several years during Anthony’s childhood. The young Anthony became fluent in French and experienced intensely the artistic culture available to him there, stimulating an interest which lasted a lifetime and formed the basis for his later career. His brother was the brother of writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and of numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt, and the grandnephew of poet Wilfri Scawen Blunt. He met the future poet Julian Bell through the Cambridge Apostles, a clandestine Cambridge discussion group of 12 undergraduates, mostly from Trinity and King’s Colleges who considered themselves to be the brightest minds. Many others were homosexual and Marxist at that time. Amongst the other members were Victor Rothschild and the American Michael Whitney Straight, the latter of whom was also suspected of being part of the spy ring also later used by MI5. The third cousin of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: his mother was the second cousin of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.
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