Philip Grierson - Dumbarton Oaks and Brussels

Dumbarton Oaks and Brussels

Grierson’s academic career eventually spread beyond Cambridge when, in 1947, he was invited to take up the vacant chair of numismatics at Brussels, which he held until his retirement in 1981. Grierson spent parts of the Easter and Christmas vacation in Brussels every year, along with more occasional visits. For many years already Grierson’s interests had encompassed the medieval Low Countries, and he had a number of friends in Belgium, not least the great Carolingian scholar François-Louis Ganshof.

Work in the United States began in 1953, when Grierson was one of the founding instructors at the American Numismatic Society’s annual summer school. He returned the following year, and in 1955 was invited to become honorary adviser and curator at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington DC, managed by the trustees of Harvard University. His brief was to use the centre’s considerable resources to build up the world’s finest collection of Byzantine coinage and publish it – a task which, by the time he left the post in 1997, he had completed admirably (despite once accidentally dropping a tray of gold coins down a lift shaft). The Catalogue of Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection remains the standard reference work for Byzantine coinage. At the height of his productivity, therefore, Grierson would spend the Michaelmas, Lent and East terms each year in Cambridge, Christmas and Easter in Brussels and two months of the summer vacation in Washington and at Cornell University.