From butterflies to thunderbolts

Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907 – 26 March 1983), styled Sir Anthony Blunt from 1956 until November 1979, was a leading British art historian and a Soviet spy. Blunt was a professor of the history of art at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition (in a version slightly revised by Richard Beresford) in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best account of the subject. He was the "fourth man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of Cambridge-educated spies who worked for the Soviets between the 1930s and the 1950s.