Slade, Felix (
b London, Aug. 1790;
d London, 29 Mar. 1868). English art collector and philanthropist. He left a great part of his collection, notable particularly for glass, to the
British Museum and in his will he endowed chairs of fine art at the universities of London (University College), Oxford, and Cambridge. The professorships at Oxford and Cambridge involve only the giving of lectures, intended for a general audience, but in London the Slade School of Fine Art, opened in 1871, is an institution giving practical instruction. The first professor was Sir Edward
Poynter, who founded the Slade tradition of emphasis on drawing from the nude. Rapidly overtaking the
Royal Academy (where the teaching methods were considered arid and academic) as the most important art school in the country, the Slade had its heyday in the period from about 1895 to the First World War. Its students then included some of the most illustrious names in 20th-century British art—
Augustus and Gwen
John, Wyndham
Lewis, Paul
Nash, Ben
Nicholson, Stanley
Spencer, and so on. Poynter's successors in London have included
Legros, Frederick Brown (1851–1941), who was professor from 1892 to 1917, presiding over the School's golden age,
Tonks,
Coldstream, and
Gowing. The first Slade professors at Oxford and Cambridge respectively were
Ruskin and the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt. Their successors have included many eminent art historians.
