William Mostyn-Owen papers concerning I Tatti

William Mostyn-Owen, art historian, was born, 10 May 1929, into a military family, the youngest of three brothers and a sister. His brothers died during the Second World War, and he was still a teenager when his father died, leaving him to inherit the family seat at Woodhouse, in Shropshire, for which he retained a great affection all his life, and Aberuchill Castle in Perthshire, which he eventually sold. Educated at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge, he traveled widely in postwar Italy and France, visiting many private collections as well as the famous museums and galleries.

During the 1950s he developed a deep love of the Italian Renaissance through six years of close contact with Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti. After the mother of a school friend introduced him to Berenson, "Willy" was enrolled in the Berensonian circle of scholars and acquantainces, among them Harold Acton, Kenneth Clark, Rosamond Lehmann and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He was particularly devoted to Berenson's secretary, Nicky Mariano. After two years spent compiling a bibliography of Berenson's immense array of critical writings, he edited a new English edition of his employer's path-breaking study of Lorenzo Lotto, and (with Luisa Vertova) revised Berenson's publications on Venetian and Florentine painters. After short spells at the Fogg Museum in Harvard and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, he was hired by Christie's, where he was made a director in 1968 and chairman of Christie's Education from 1979 to 1988. His enduring love of travel served him well when he founded Christie's Tours.

He contributed to the Oxford Companion to Western Art and the Macmillan Dictionary of Art and wrote articles for the Burlington Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement and various newspapers. His reminiscences of Berenson and Clark, delivered at an I Tatti seminar on the 50th anniversary of Berenson's death in 2009, are due to be published.

He was a member of the council of Keele University, of the Society of Dilettanti, and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

He died 2 May 2011.