English writer, collector and museum official. Educated at Charterhouse and New College, Oxford, from 1905 to 1938 he worked for the Board of Education, serving in his capacity as a Board official as Deputy Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 1910–13. His first books were on Raphael and Botticelli, but Oppé subsequently concentrated on English art, finding himself equally at home in the salerooms and in the world of academic scholarship. His purchases as a collector included the lucky discovery of 17 watercolours by Francis Towne, which he was able to buy for only five shillings since Towne, along with many other English watercolour painters of the later 18th century, was so little regarded at that time. Oppé made extensive investigations into the life and works of Alexander Cozens and his son John Robert Cozens, and he also undertook important research on Paul Sandby and his brother Thomas Sandby, many of whose drawings were (and remain) in the royal collection at Windsor Castle, Berks. His catalogue of drawings at Windsor (1950) is at once a study of English art and an account of the growth and development of the royal collection itself. Oppé’s own private collection of watercolours and Italian Old Master drawings, which subsequently passed to his daughter, was exhibited at the Royal Academy the year after his death. A sensitive and generous account of his career by Charles Mitchell was published in the reprint (1970) of Oppé’s Raphael.