Up for auction a RARE! "British Historian" Joan Evans Hand Signed 3X5 Card.

ES-4557E

Dame

Joan Evans DBE FSA (22

June 1893 – 14 July 1977) was a British historian of French and

English mediaeval art, especially

Early Modern and medieval jewellery. Her

notable collection was bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum in

London. Joan Evans was born at Nash Mills, Apsley, Hertfordshire, the daughter of antiquarian and

businessman Sir John Evans and

his third wife, Maria Millington Lathbury (1856–1944).

She was half-sister to Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of Knossos and discoverer of Minoan civilisation. Sir

Arthur was forty two years her senior: he caused huge hilarity at an

antiquarian conference of learned and erudite gentlemen when he brought in a

four-year-old Joan to be "shown off". Evans was educated

privately before going up to St Hugh's College, Oxford to

read Archaeology. She graduated in 1916 as M.A..

In 1930 she was awarded a D.Litt.. The Royal Institution of Great Britain's records suggest that

Evans was the first woman to give a Friday Evening Discourse at the

Institution: this was on 8 June 1923, the title being "Jewels of the

Renaissance". In 1950, Evans's book Cluniac Art of

the Romanesque Period,

which concerned art and sculptures made by the monks of the abbey at Cluny in

eastern France, was published by Cambridge University Press.

A Fellow of

the Society of Antiquaries of London, she published the Society's

official history in 1956, and served as its first woman President from 1959–64.