 Welcome, everybody. I'm delighted to have you all back for the second day of our conference on Paul Opay and the practice of art history in Britain in the first half of the 20th century. I hope today's discussions will evolve just as fruitfully as yesterday's proceedings and that we can build on the debates and insights that we collected yesterday. Just a very brief overview of the programme for today, the academic session, if you want, this morning consists of three papers. I will, of course, like yesterday, introduce the speakers individually. Our theme this morning is broadly speaking careers on the margins. So, the biographical side of how art historians try to establish a professional career without necessarily being part of one of the established institutional career pathways. So, how did they map out their fortunes in the absence of a clearly defined professional pathway that was to follow? After that, that will occupy us throughout the morning. At noon, we will split up in groups, those of you who are in the room, and have tours of, on the one hand side, the drawing room display, where I will guide you through some of the things that you've already heard yesterday, but we will also have the opportunity to go down to the study room and see some of the archival treasures from the Opay archive that are not on display, and Charlotte and Emma will also speak a bit more broadly about the archive and library collections, collection policies, and the way that this archive has evolved, and this resource has evolved over recent years. As this conference is testimony of, it's clearly becoming a force to be reckoned with, and a very serious resource that is, I think, starting to reshape our picture of art historiography in Britain quite substantially. So, we're delighted to have the opportunity to delve further into that. After lunch, we will then have a round table chaired by Sarah and myself, where we will, I think, very much workshoppy, think about further directions for the study of British art historiography. So, where does these proceedings today and yesterday, where do they take us, what comes next, and how best to further study this area? So, I very much look forward to that, but first and foremost, I look forward to this morning's papers, and it is my great pleasure to introduce our first speaker, Sue Sloman, who is, of course, a well-known presence at the Paul Mellon Centre. So, I feel I don't need to introduce her extensively. She is, of course, a historian of British art, unsurprisingly, in this context, and I just want to highlight her most recent publications, in particular, the beautiful volume on Gainsborough in London that was published in 2021. More recently, she has also published, for example, on the infant drawings of Sir Thomas Lawrence, and is currently working on a catalogue of the Thomson Collection of British Portrait miniatures, and in the Art Gallery of Ontario. The title, apparently, is yet to be determined, even though the book is scheduled to come out next year, so I'm sure the publisher is keenly waiting for the definitive title here, but today she is going to speak about one of these forgotten art historians that shaped art historiography in Britain so decisively, GC Williamson, and with that, I hand over to you, Sue. Well, thank you very much, and thank you for that kind introduction, and it's really lovely to be here, and I'm so pleased this conference has been so well supported, and yesterday was wonderful. We learned a huge amount, and I hope some of what I'm saying is going to build on things that we heard yesterday, and certainly I was struck by how much the dates, the sort of key dates, seemed to coincide across the whole field. So, we've been thinking about how art historians made a living, and some such as GC Williamson made themselves into so-called experts using publishing as a tool, and in particular technical advancements in photographic reproduction, and before photography, obviously art books relied on line engravings or mezzatins, neither of which could be produced in quantity or really show paintings. They were never completely satisfactory. Photography and photographic printing changed everything, but it took about 40 to 50 years, and the key names I'm going to be referring to, I put up on the screen because they're not all necessarily very familiar to us today. Both Williamson and Roger Frye worked for the American collector J.P. Morgan in the first decade of the 20th century, and it's clear that the art market was as important to art historians as the publishing industry, and indeed the two were intertwined. Going back to 1858, the year that Williamson was born, the art dealers Cornaggy and Agnew produced a souvenir of the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures exhibition, the first publication of its kind, illustrated by the Italian photographers Caltaisi and Montecchi, who had based themselves in London. If you want to see all the photographs that they printed for this souvenir, there's a very good online record of it on the Royal Collection website. It pasted in photographs, were soon superseded by photographic reproductions made by specialist photographers such as Jay Hallott, Hyatt of Oxford Street and Dickinson's of New Bond Street, all of course in Monochrome. By 1906, Williamson was engaged in what he later regarded as the highlight of his career, his four-volume catalogue of portrait miniatures in the Pierpont Morgan Collection. This is a lavishly illustrated with photographial plates by Hallott Hyatt. And out of a hundred and fifty, a total of a hundred and fifty sets of this book, forty were printed on Japanese vellum, which is a very smooth handmade paper. And they had a hundred and twenty-nine of the plates within that deluxe set. A hundred and twenty-nine of the plates were duplicated and hand-coloured and gilded by what was described as a little army of some fifty artists. This set shown here fetched, as you can see, £25,000 at auction. And I think none of us are ever going to achieve that with any of our books. Most copies were given by Morgan to, well in fact they were all given away rather than sold. So most were given to heads of state museums and libraries. And some he gave to friends, which is why they occasionally do appear on the market, but it's quite rare. So Morgan's collections were at this time in London as well as New York. And he inherited the house on the left here, thirteen princes gate from his father, and then he managed to buy the house next door in 1904, which was also the year that he became president of the Metropolitan Museum. And in England Morgan appointed, as advisers, Roger Frye in 1905 and GC Williamson in 1906. And as befitted the very different characters of these men, Frye's job was to think big, to formulate ideas for the Met, as well as for Morgan's own collection. Well Williamson was to produce sumptuous catalogs. And Frye was a university man, an apostle, and at Cambridge University he was an intimate friend of the writer and philosopher Goldsworthy Lois Dickinson, who as it happens was a sign of the Dickinson family of publishers that we've already mentioned in New Bond Street. Williamson, by contrast, appears to have had very little formal education. And he does not seem to have been entitled to the doctor or delit that he habitually added to his name. He was born into a family of furniture makers in Guilford. And his father, who really wanted to be a pharmacist, was a reluctant managing director of the company of Williamson's and son's. And GC Williamson himself, when he inherited with two brothers, he inherited the company, he was equally reluctant. And eventually managed to free himself and become a writer and self-styled art expert. Williamson's was actually a perfectly respectable company with a history that went back to 1720 and a royal appointment. And in the 19th century it produced high-quality reproduction furniture. And I mean this is a piece that sold recently and marked pieces, people, pieces marked with Williamson's name, still fetch high prices. It's noticeable that GC Williamson never ever mentions the nature of the family firm in any of his three published memoirs. Occasionally he refers to the discreable inconvenience of business, but nothing more. What he does mention, some are oddly, is the occupation of his maternal grandfather, a Mr Rutter who practiced as a mesmerist in Brighton. And as a young boy Williamson spent much time in the Rutter household and he was proud to count himself one of those special individuals whose personal electricity or what was called the odic force was manifested through the galvanoscope, an instrument which had been invented in Germany and was used by Rutter during consultations with psychiatric patients. And Rutter was part shaman, part pseudo scientist and Williamson claimed that Rutter knew and even conducted experiments with Michael Faraday and William Henry Fox Torbott. Rutter's long room was at Black Rock on the seafront at Camptown in Brighton and the attractions there included an aquarium fed by seawater and a reading room. And the frontispiece to Rutter's human electricity, which you see here, shows Williamson's aunt Sophie demonstrating the galvanoscope. In 1885 when he was 27, so not that young, it was still nominally involved in the furniture business, Williamson visited the London Art Collection of John Lumson Proput. This was a private collection, but people could visit by appointment. So this visit and Proput's own catalogue for which you can see the title page here which was published following year. This Williamson says inspired him to make a career in the art world. Proput was a successful medical doctor, a competent amateur artist. There are some of his etchings in the British Museum, a major collector and one of the prime movers behind the 1889 exhibition of miniatures organised by the Burlington Fine Arts Club. And this is a page to show that this catalogue had very high quality illustrations and it was, the text was written by Proput. By 1894, having made that decision to try and make a living in the art world, by 1894 Williamson had published his first monograph which was on the pastel paint at John Russell, that's the book on the left here. And John Russell had been born in Guilford, so Williamson had access to material which hadn't been used before. So it was a good book for him to start off with because he was familiar with the background history. In 1895 a year later he visited the convent at Lodi near Milan in Italy in search of material for a book on Richard Cosway and the Cosway book and others that followed including the book on the right here, on the primers, were published by George Bell and Sons and it was Bell in long term that became the most important publisher in his career. Until 1898 the art editor at Bells was a man called Joseph Gleason White who was a distinguished writer and designer and the second editor of the studio magazine. And after Gleason White's premature death Williamson became Bell's commissioning editor for this great masters series and Bells became the regular publisher of his own books and this just gives you a title of some of the first books in the great masters series. There were eventually well over 30 titles ranging from Italian early Renaissance subjects to David Wilkie and Williamson himself wrote several of the books in the series. Each they were standardised each book had 40 illustrations and sold for five shillings. At the same time Williamson edited Bells pocket sized miniature series these were called miniature series because of the size of the book not the subject and these two took advantage of Bell's tradition of stylish book design. These covers were designed by Gleason White before his death and each book had eight illustrations and it was sold at two prices either one shilling for this version or two shillings for a leather binding and they were the sort of book you could put in your pocket and take on a train and could be seen as a way of democratising art history and for me they're actually one of the most positive of Williamson's achievements but interestingly and I can only put this down to Snobbery he doesn't use his own name for this small book but uses a pseudonym. Bells had acquired the upmarket printers the Chiswick Press in 1880 and it was this press in in collaboration with the photographer Jay Hallott Hyatt that rose to the challenge of producing catalogs of JPMorgan's collections and Williamson was responsible for the portrait miniatures catalogs jewels small sculptures and watches and as you can see here the deluxe edition had plates selected plates that were not just washed with a tint of of watercolour but were solidly painted over the photographure and set within wash lines as if they were watercolours really. Williamson's catalog of watches also had gilding and silvered plates so the the gilding you can see on this on the frame here is actual gilding in in the book but interestingly this suppose miniature by Samuel Cooper which is so carefully reproduced was actually not an original it was actually a copy although Williamson cataloged it as the real thing. The Morgan collection miniatures did contain some real treasures and since Holbein is very much in the air at the moment with the exhibition at the Queen's Gallery I just thought I'd show you this famous Holbein which was in the catalogue and correctly described so one of the sort of one of the genuine treasures in in the Morgan collection. The first two volumes of the miniatures set were devoted to British works and it's evident from Williamson's introductory essay that he intended to bookend the British collection with an example by Holbein and one by an eminent pre-Raphaelite these and it's at this point really with the whole structure of of the book and the collection that things start to fall apart as Williamson's desire to create a narrative seems to have overridden his visual judgment. This object had the distinction of being number one in volume one but it's not as he stated a portrait by Holbein and nor is it of the astronomer Nicholas Kratzer. Here it is. It's now in the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge where they are fully aware that it's not what it was said to be. It was one of the Whipple Museum's curators in the mid-1950s who started questioning a number of objects that had been acquired by the unsuspecting Robert Whipple and the the objects were mostly the the suspect objects were mostly scientific instruments but included this portrait and already when in 1935 when Morgan's miniatures were auctioned this was called School of Holbein rather than Holbein but now it's acknowledged that it's probably at best late 19th century and note the frame which is different to the frame that's in the illustrated in the catalogue so it was changed at some point and I don't know in this case where the Williamson was responsible but he certainly was responsible for framing the last object in the British section of the Morgan catalogue the supposed pre-Raphaelite and I should say here that the story of this object has been fully documented by Joe Briggs of the Walters Art Museum where it now resides and I'll give you the reference at the end to her excellent article what Joe Briggs did not have time to discuss in full is the way in which this book ended with the Holbein this book ended the Morgan catalogue and collection and how it relates to another George Bell publication so in a nutshell Williamson makes this the last catalogue entry and describes it as a miniature by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of his wife Elizabeth Siddle and Briggs shows that it's actually a cart to visit photograph of an unidentified woman um with rather crudely applied colour the woman's pose amalgamates elements of Rossetti's two paintings of Beaty Beatrix the second of which featuring the crossed hands is actually based on Jane Morris rather than Elizabeth Siddle and Williamson would have known both images because in 1889 Bells had published a substantial book on Rossetti by um H.C. Mariellier who was a French scholar including reproductions of both those paintings and Williamson himself says in his memoirs how much he admired Mariellier as a person and the Rossetti book back in 1906 Williamson constructed a provenance for what he calls the Rossetti miniature and he arranged its framing and over time he provided several different versions of the provenance all very Dickensian in character very and very dramatic and he writes almost as if he was present when the object was made in 1936 when he sent a series of articles country life he does for the first time call the image a photograph but he then describes how Rossetti in a frenzy of grief sitting at Siddle's deathbed tore the photograph out of an album and coloured it in order to try and record her appearance somehow his work for Morgan allowed Williamson to move into a very grand burhouse in Hampstead where he had got to a jeekel design his garden and where he hung his own collection the catalogue of which he produced in 1909 again printed by the jizzic press at the same time coincidentally Roger Fry was also living in Hampstead but he was in a rather more modest 22 Willow Road and the last of Williamson's Morgan catalogs was published in 1912 and was of watches and like the miniatures it had in this case 20 copies on Japanese vellum hand coloured and gilded and silvered again with plates by Hallett Hyatt and a copy of that catalogue sold for $81,000 at Christie's in 2015 so people who are interested in watches still very much want to own that. Exactly how Williamson benefited from his association with Morgan is not clear and one would need to delve into the archive at the Morgan library to get a fuller picture but he certainly seems to have made more money than any anyone could have made by just being paid to write catalogs and it's striking that a rather similar journalist art historian called Charles Lewis Hind has recently been shown to have participated in a complicated and secret financial deal with Agnews to purchase Velasquez Roqueby Venus for the National Gallery and again there's a very good article on this in the Burlington magazine. Now that deal happened in 1905 to 1906 so it's exactly the same period that Williamson is working for Morgan and his lifestyle is suddenly changed so dramatically so it appears that the art market must have played a major role in the lives of both Hind and Williamson and in fact these two men knew each other they even went to the same school. Around 1912 Williamson appears to have grown anxious about future employment. Morgan was aging and in fact died in 1913 and in 1912 Williamson got wind of a planned publication on Samuel Cooper and the Miniaturist of the 17th century by JJ Foster and this was a subject that Williamson regarded as his own and by extension Bell's own and Foster had acquired the rival printer publishers Dickinson's which was as capable as Bell's of producing high quality reproductions and in a move that smacks of paranoia Williamson penned letters to several owners and agents advising them not to allow their miniatures to be photographed for Foster's book and several of their responses are tipped into Williamson's own copy of Foster's book which did of course get published and Bell's existed in various guises until 1989 long after Williamson's death but his connection effectively ended with the first world war when it became unrealistic to produce expensive art books but he continued to reminisce and write about miniatures and produced books on Zolffany and Angelica Kaifman for the publisher John Lane in 1920 and 1924 both of these in collaboration with Lady Victoria Manners and perversely when writing in hindsight about miniatures and his work for Morgan he often focused on works that must already have been discredited such as the Rosetti and these two supposed Cosways within this this is his 1925 memoir he even reproduces you can see on right hand page the spurious inscription on the back of one of these miniatures and unlike somebody like Paul Ope who spent decades mulling over the artists Alexandra and JR Cousins before committing himself to paper Williamson rattled through more subjects than anyone could possibly master and his judgments became increasingly outlandish I have kept wondering whether his whether his eyesight was defective defective whether he was excessively gullible or was a little mad or bad in the end it seems to me that like his maternal grandfather Williamson believed the myths that he himself created and here is the extraordinary portrait he commissioned of himself as El Greco so as you can see it's entitled portrait of the author as he was seen by El Greco in 1578 revisaged I don't know whether that's the word but it's there revisaged in London in 1910 by Vernon Hill the reference to 1578 and Toledo must point to El Greco's burial of account Orgath which includes a soft portrait the third head from the left there and does and this painting does bear the date 1578 although we now know it's not actually the date when the picture was painted so it was apparently Robert Ross Oscar Wilde's friend and literary executor who pointed out Williamson's El Greco type of face but the idea for the port for this portrait and its use of the frontispiece comes from Charles Lewis Hind the journalist associated with the rugby Venus and as the frontispiece to his fictional tale the education of an artist published in 1906 Hind printed an Italian 16th century portrait of an unknown man who he claims is the double of his hero Claude Williamson Shaw Hind's hero you will notice has Williamson is his middle name his first name refers to Claude Phillips a writer and art critic and his last name to George Bernard Shaw now I'm going to leave you with this image because it does it does sort of speak volumes I think and I've only really sort of scratched the surface of this but what I will just put up on the screen is the reference to Joe Briggs article because that's that's really where you'll find this solid information thank you thank you for a fascinating paper um as yesterday we're going to have questions for all papers of that session at the end so please do keep your question in mind until a little later I'm delighted to introduce our second speaker this morning again who might need to introduce a length because she has chaired already yesterday so she'd been a known face Emily Oneron Evans is an art historian based at Queen Mary's University of London where she's seen a lecture in French which is a fascinating combination in its own right she has published very widely about art historiography cultural transfers and the question of translation in art writing her first book was on Nicholas Pefsner in particular his role as science communicator and his his work for the BBC and forthcoming later this year fingers crossed that time is running out is is is a new monograph on Linda Nocklin and her reception mainly in the francophone world I should also mention that she will be a very shortly PI on a collaborative project grant funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for a collaboration with the University of Aberdeen for a project on women making art history and we are also hearing today about the role of women for the discipline so Emily please I am very pleased to be here and I'd like to thank the organizers again it's been a wonderful exchange of ideas and overlaps of different worlds so far and I see connections emerging as we as we go so I'll try to make my contribution to these world building exercise with a paper entitled the rise of the picture researcher women art historians and visual literacy in post world Britain and I will be weaving together testimonies and memories of three women in particular Ruth Rosenberg Hilda Quartz and Eva Foitwank Norrad what they have in common is their personal situation of emigres seeking refuge from national socialism in Britain their interest in art history whether it's backed up by academic training or not and their employment for a company a packaging company called Adprint either temporarily or officially in the capacity of picture researcher extend research on the history of art publishing already exists including Anna and I books groundbreaking book emigres and it has suggested that the role indeed the profession of picture researcher as it came to be understood was shaped in part by the work of the ad prince team which employed many women many of them central european exiles so picture researchers as I'll try to demonstrate seems to be a gendered profession and I'm using the intellectual framework shaped by Heidi Egington then Zoe Thomas's work on women in employment the history of precarious professionals as they call them in their essay collection and we want to survey how professional recognition could be claimed adapted and denied by historical subjects at different moments and as I hope you will see in these examples these are various facets recognizable in the testimonies or in the experiences of the free women I'm talking about when we look at the history of the discipline from the point of view of professions it opens discussion to and fost as an understanding of the power and expertise that having a professional position grants in in public life or doesn't grant in some respects arguably also as many studies of the trajectory of emigre art refugees or refugee scholars have shown women professionals who trained in art history so most often abroad because institutionally the subject wasn't established as we've said many times people who were seeking employment in Britain in their own discipline faced even more severe constraints that their male counterparts some of them when they ended up being high in subsidiary roles or in roles that represented for them a departure from their field of expertise experience a loss of their professional sense of self as art historians and apparently at at print people of people who worked there were quite ill paid and the women especially so as was customary at the time in the publishing trade it could also be said and we want to explore this possibility as well that female dominated networks active in publishing and in book packaging so through the example of at print carved out a new space for their art historical skills so we'll see a balance and a various combination through these examples so I'm going to start with talking through the memories of Ruth Rosenberg who is quoted in an interview in 1991 saying you know my mother was right I think I got a job at at print because of that detail and so she was also interviewed for the British Library sound archive project on artist lives which I accessed fortunately before the great chaos that ensued after a cyber attack so Rosenberg was born in 1905 and she studied in Freiburg, Berlin and Munich. Her PhD was supervised by Wilhelm Pender who some of you may know for his self-sufferous and notorious reputation of having been closed politically to the Nazi regime. This is very clearly nuanced and unpacked in Marlitha Albertsmouth's biography of Pender but what can be said factually is that he was a staunch defender of German art and he was also instrumental despite being a very prominent scholar and erudite instrumental in the popularization of art history through the production of art books in the Blau Bucher the Blau Bucher series so more of that later. Rosenberg learned the publishing trade at Ulstein at the picture center of the Berliner Illustrierte which she calls the first illustrated paper ever invented and so I want to quote some of passages of these interview I would have love to like give you her voice and the extracts but we'll have to wait for the British Library to reopen so imagine a roof Rosenberg I can't do a justice but the photographers brought the material all first to the Berliner Illustrierte and there were two experienced women and me coming from university and one had to see all the stuff and see it I learned a lot I learned how to see pictures also to see from a journalistic point of view the importance of pictures to remember pictures so now my visual memory seems to be very strong but it was not good enough and I started for myself a card index and she uses card index to um put piece together uh when um a similar topic came up the images that she's already catalogued or seen so all this is very important as a backdrop to her work in ad print she arrived in England in 1939 and trained first to become factory worker so we we talked about precarity and um embodied scholarship well uh artistry degree wasn't of much value when she arrived so she and she had to make a living coming completely um uh on her own uh in England uh so she was employed in a factory then she um trained as a frame maker um and by chance so this is a reference to the Warburg Institute coming up she got an interview for a secretarial job with ad print via someone she knew from the Warburg Institute um so this is what she says about the interview I cannot type I don't know shorthand so I was not the perfect secretary but the interviewer was such a decent person she had made up her mind she had to do something we talked and she said you know you have to see our production manager which was uh Walter Neurat the the later founder of Thames and co-founder of Thames and Hudson the story is because of history of art I got the job so Walter Neurat was impressed by her degree um and uh and got her job um so her mother was right as she says in convincing her to to pursue a postgraduate degree so um this is how Rosenberg describes ad print in her own words they produced books it was a very ingenious invention they produced books for other publishers and the packaging company as defined by David Lambert in any study of ad prints is about planning producing an illustrated book that will be sold for a agreed price to a publisher who stocks and marks at it it involves commissioning and author and artists or photographers who work with an in-house team of editor designers and picture researchers um and my my my focus here will be on um Britain in pictures um the the series that Rosenberg called very ingenious it was a fantastic series created during the war she said for very little money you could give very nice gifts coming up to Christmas so and it went back to a German series the Blau Bücher that was the idea that was taken over um she mentions um a colleague or Mary Patton who was editor and also did a bit of production um who um of course she says of course there was no question of being secretary actually um but I did picture research and Mary introduced me to uh the task so if we were tempted to see a pattern of foreign scholars coming to Britain and uh influencing local practices we need to nuance it it was actually uh even if Rosenberg came with her wealth of experience through the Berliner illustrioteur with her PhD um she learned on the job to be a picture researcher in dialogue with her British colleagues and she said but there is still a difference in status as she describes it was very difficult to do picture research for the series because the museums were not accessible and and the libraries the London library came written Oxford the only thing I knew for this job was how to use a library but nothing else is being modest here um so Britain in pictures is an interesting case study in the symbolism that the collection entails of a cultural war effort a demonstration of the soft power of of images so I have a couple of examples to illustrate there is this English cities and small towns by John Benjamin that has the wonderful opening nine not until you have been away from it do you realize how friendly how beautiful is the meanest English town I hear I hear agreement in the room um and life among the English by um Rose McCully um contained so the the work of the picture researchers is here apparent in the selection of drawing by war artists so they were supporting a network of artists um up and coming not not only uh finding in libraries illustrate historical images but also uh either commissioning or supporting the work of um of artists so you have um you have Anthony Gross um social life in wartime on the on the left and uh drawing by Henry Moore called uh or from a series called modern interior scene on the on the right so the picture researchers was is very essential in structuring the connections between the texts and images in the books as well as selecting them but imagine having to procure illustrations and to do picture research on books that contain such statements as I'm quoting from the the last page provincial social life meanwhile was complicated and somewhat embitted by evacuees from raided cities whose habits proved often unpleasant to the natives and refugees from conquered lands who also did not invariably give satisfaction to patriots in these areas conversation tended to turn on the attributes and practices of one or other of these two groups um and we have it from Rosenberg's interview that her experience were sometimes difficult um she says when I went to Cambridge to the Fitzwilliam whoever was the director there said to me I do not know why people like you are doing this work when our people are fighting and um she she says she replied I wanted to fight but they didn't let me um so yeah they oops sorry these women refugees were um considered uh in the margins of of society as well as in professional margins um and so to to finish on on Rosenberg she she said also in that interview from 1991 that while she hunted through libraries for illustrations I would begin juxtaposing the pictures in my head but then the designers wouldn't use them the way I saw them and a co-worker told them well stop grumbling and start designing so um we have the here the making of her transition from picture researcher to to really book design um and I want to move on to to Hilder courts um to give us sort of a different note um about um having to carve a place for yourself and a different approach uh Hilder courts was an Austrian art historian who trained in Vienna uh like her husband Otto uh they both got their doctorate from Julius with Julius from Schloser and as uh Otto courts left for London uh in 1934 accompanying the verbal library Hilder followed later um they had very diverging paths um he was able to pursue his career as an art historian um but while she he had to take a position at at print to to earn a living um and um I guess I I added this the following anecdote that is quoted in a new books essay on the courts archive in reference to a discussion we had yesterday Hilder mentioned in a letter to her sister Ilse in June 1938 that Kenneth Clark had asked her to compile the index for his book on Leonardo da Vinci and she said she was not paid for the job until May 1939. I quote the first index brought in 12 pounds it arrived today with the excuse that it had taken sir Kenneth so long to find out the correct amount and this is one of the richest men in England and is supposed to be as elegant as he is distinguished so this is um the translation from Neibald's essay yeah so um courts made very rare illusions to her job in correspondence or the material according to her daughter um Erica Barrett she did not keep anything related to having been in at print and we can wonder whether it was out of intellectual modesty or um yeah I'm I'm speculating about the idea of feeling like you're squandering your intellectual skills and doing something that is not particularly rewarding intellectually. I just wanted to give you maybe it's not in some fair on pinterance and but I wanted to quote the uh part of the British sea fisherman volume most people have only the vaguest idea of how the fish they eat is caught or of the light of the men who catch it perhaps this little book will give them a better appreciation of the sea fisherman of Britain this is why it was it has been Britain so I I'm aware that I'm giving intonations that suggest that it's not a particularly scholarly um you know challenging book and so we can understand why Hilda Courts um said um according to her daughter Erica Barrett um about Britain in pictures it was a hack work uh and she refused to have her name printed printed in the at at print production it did allow her to bring an in an income and to support our other refugees of her art friends others like the designer Bettina Ehrlich or the polish artist um Katarina Vilcinski of whom you can see a drawing uh on that page so uh Rosenberg and Courts collected their own library of illustration their browse through second hand bookshops um like like we saw they they asked their friends um for for drawings or commissioned them and little by little they accumulated actual um illustration archives um that um that became the sort of core of um in-house picture collections and indeed Rosenberg took her collection with her when she started working at Thames and Hudson um so to to introduce Eva Noirad uh I thought I would just give you two illustrations to to show the range of um in in which um building uh sorry Britain in pictures operated uh from John Piper's British Romantic Artists to Margaret Lambert's and Enid Marx's English Popular and Traditional Art so I'll get back to it oh sorry yeah I'll get back to it in a second um Eva Noirad so Eva Foistfank Noirad emigrated with her then husband Wilhelm Foistfank who was intern as enemy alien on the Isle of Man during the war and uh to get out of internment uh was offered the possibility of joining the army which he he took and by doing that um uh Eva as his wife uh the status she had changed from enemy alien enemy alien she was then allowed to uh taken um on employment and she was hired at at print um so as she writes in her memoir the books were attractively designed and the subjects were documented by illustrations in the text so I I like this turn of phrase uh because it illustrates sorry uh what is at the core of the picture researcher task it's not merely uh the illustrations not merely complement they uh they are also part of the documentation they are part of the of the subject uh she says she worked on the britain in picture series and learned how to make layouts and she was sent out to do picture research uh unlike Rosenberg or course she did not have any art historical training instead uh she she had an eye and uh she developed on the job an astute practice of integrating images and texts um her experience of art publishing in england was that it was rather inconspicuous certainly here in the books on art and artistry appeared but it was still rather innovative and indeed risky to produce illustrated finely printed luxury books um so that's an endeavor that um Walter Neurat and and and she tried from 1949 when they founded um Thames and Hudson um so I just wanted to go through some of the pages of um Lambert and Marx's English popular and traditional art to to illustrate this idea of uh enhancing visual literacy uh that doesn't have necessarily to be on topics of like fine arts but it's really also opening new um new avenues for uh for scholarship as as modest as these little books were they contain such uh statements that we we would not only agree but welcome today uh in in researching visual arts so the blurb on the left says popular art is the art which ordinary people have created for their own lives by contrast to the fine arts made for spatial patrons it covers a wider field than the arts and crafts which are confined exclusively to handwork and can equally well manifest itself in machine made things when the right spirit pervades the design for the general public it gives as nothing else can an intimate picture of the feelings and sympathies likes and dislikes of many generations of ordinary English people so this book among the britain in pictures series it shows how the um the art was brought to the people and there is a process of democratisation uh at play here as well um so um I'm going back to this image of Eva Neurat um to to quote Tom Rosenthal in uh um so who titled an essay on the Neurat couple and Thameson Hudson in immigrant publishers their books married words with pictures and indeed this is what I've noticed in the self-definition of picture researchers their task was to just do that value as high equally highly the process by which we experience images um combine with uh texts and not just as secondary um so I have a few words of conclusions so Brian Mills said about at print and britain in pictures that it was a phenomenal success due to a combination of accessible scholarship and attractive presentation and upon first reading this quote man might think that there is a hierarchy that presentation would come after in the service of as an illustration of ideas but I hope we've seen here that the contribution of these women was to establish the picture researcher as a central protagonist one that practices presentation of images as a form of scholarship deliberately generating knowledge and reactions they contributed to major innovations in the visual appearance of books and embedded in publishing practices as demonstrated through the work of Thameson Hudson um the pedagogical benefits of a carefully designed text image relationship they enable the crucial articulation between art scholarship and art popularization that this new profession represented through the selection and the dissemination of images that enhance the public taste for art and democratized art historical education collaborating with artists photographers and illustrators they transpose their scholarly methods and curator strategies albeit in an ad hoc manner um at first maybe but actually increasingly professionally prompting the creation of in-house picture archives and prompting also the development of um yeah picture archive as a practice as a scholarly practice yes well that's my concluding statement thank you thank you so much Emily um I will directly continue with introducing the last speaker of this morning also because the time is progressing mercilessly I'm afraid um but I'm sure we're all still still fascinated by what we're hearing so all good on that front um Jeffrey Lina is our final speaker in this panel he is an associate professor at Texas State University which he joined a few years ago after a while after a time is visiting professor at Harvard um he has worked oh he's he's published and lectured widely I will just mention his monograph from 2018 Flintstone Modernism or the Crisis in Postwar American Culture which is a most intriguing title and and a book that touches on subjects such as Hollywood films the fate of the classical tradition and postwar anxieties today though he is going to speak about in my view one of the most intriguing characters in British art historiography Roger Hinx so Jeffrey thank you come start up clapping for you thanks Hans good morning my talk focuses on a newly forgotten figure Roger Hinx if Hinx is known today at all it is more as a diarist than an art historian I discovered him during the pandemic while reading James Lee's Milner's diaries in a mingled measure in an entry from 1972 Lee's Milner offers a cruel but truthful description of both Hinx and his diaries I think it's worth quoting here as a means of introduction Ian McCallum tells me that Roger Hinx's diaries are at last to be published or rather the four million words have been condensed by their editor to one volume Ian says that Roger kept the diary all his life there is no sequence apart from chronological for it is not concerned with events nor with gossip hardly any reference to personalities which is a surprise for he was an extremely spiky chippy man who could be devastatingly rude I found him alarming he was exceedingly ugly with a stiff starch pursed lip prissy manner Ian says the diaries are in fact freely written synopsies of all the books which he never wrote the best extracts are those written when he was unhappy in capitals which he disliked living in Athens and Paris then he retreated into himself and wrote from the heart Ian says he was a marvelous friend loyal and generous in fact the edited volume titled the gymnasium of the mind appeared 12 years later in 1984 there is a foreword by Kenneth Clark which for me enlarges the mystery surrounding Hinx and deepens his allure here's a quote in middle life when at the height of his powers he became the victim of an abominable intrigue which forced him to leave his beloved British museum he wrote several admirable studies but never the book which was to have been his masterpiece a study of the decline of the classical style and its transformation into the romanesque Roger was a superb stylist clear and at times eloquent this selection of his writings shows that art history can be a form of literature I was instantly gripped by the notion that Hinx and his diaries were part of a secret history of art history and by the notion that he had been victimized and that his career suffered as a result I soon realized that his life which was spent in elite british institutions and quasi exile abroad offered a narrative worth rediscovering not only for his unusual writings but also for the object lesson it provides of the risks and the severities of pursuing a career in art history born in 1903 Hinx was educated at Westminster school and studied the classical tripose at Trinity College Cambridge he spent a year of the British school in Rome under the tutelage of the romanist Eugenie Strong in 1926 he was appointed assistant keeper in the department of Greek and Roman antiquities in the British Museum at the age of only 23 from this comfortable perch he produced studious catalogs on Greek Etruscan and Roman paintings and mosaics and Greek and Roman portrait sculpture and a book on carolingian art his diaries of the 1930s recount his frequent trips to Germany intimate friendships with aristocratic women british diplomats and his and the handsome young nazis he met in Berlin and convey an image of Hinx as opinionated and sophisticated beyond his years and at ease in high circles but fundamentally aloof given his owl like disposition what happens next comes as a shock in 1939 when a public scandal erupted over the cleaning of the Parthenon marbles Hinx was targeted as the fall guy as a low man on the totem pole he bore almost no responsibility but in a vicious tactical maneuver John Forsdike the director of the British Museum who was in fact liable himself scapegoated Hinx who was hauled before a board of inquiry and humiliated with 10 years reduction in seniority and pay and named in parliament Hinx's diary entries register his sense of disorientation as these events unfold barely grasping the enormity of what's happening even as the trustees are coercing him to resign looking back a few months later as the crisis died down he confided all has been worry and disillusion and horror John Goldsmith who edited the diaries observes of this episode it was one of the most traumatic events of his life it left psychological scars and a residue of bitterness and it permanently changed the direction of his career he was only 35 through influential friends notably notably Fritz Axel and Gertrude Bing he landed briefly at the Warburg Institute but his career as an art historian effectively stalled stationed in the British Embassy in Stockholm during the war he joined the British Council in 1945 serving as the head of the British Institute in Rome until 1949 in this role he devised lecture series on such topics as English food while he feins pleasure in dispensing with professional expertise and indulging his own bewildered curiosity in English social history it quickly becomes clear this work is uninspiring and tiresome to combat frequent bouts of depression he nurtured his aestheticism the only cure is to discover some object i had almost said some fetish capable of evoking that world of the imagination which is to me the true reality he wrote in the diary in effect he created an alternate reality filling the diary with glittering but fragmentary meditations on Baroque Rome on Piero della Francesca and Giorgione and tales of his bedside visits with Bernard Berenson at the Villa Itati in 1946 a london contact through him a lifeline in the form of a commission to write a book about Caravaggio who was then still a neglected shadowy figure when the book appeared in 1953 it coincided with a massive resurgence of interest in the artist following Roberto Longhi's momentous Caravaggio exhibition in Milan in 1951 and Dennis Mahone's series of Burlington magazine articles from 1951 and 1952 eschewing academic constraints and drawing on the luminous style of the diary Hinks set out to write in essay of interpretation and appreciation a task suited to his talents as he dug into Caravaggio's legend a deeper connection emerged between the artist's ill treatment by Rome's counter-reformation clergy and his own humiliation by the British Museum grandees he fixed on the crisis in Caravaggio's life surrounding the Carmelites rejection of the death of the virgin and the Vatican's rejection of the Madonna de Pelleffinieri in 1606 fate seemed against him Hinks writes in the book these misadventures were galling was he already a back number at 32 that he saw the artist as a kindred spirit is made explicit in a 1954 diary entry I gave DCM a copy of Caravaggio as an Easter present I told him he would see the relevance of the story to my own case Hinks developed an attraction to artists in crisis with whom he could identify he returned to Caravaggio in a 1956 entry after seeing the Malta beheading of Saint John the Baptist at an exhibition in Rome and inspired by Wiley cifers recently published four stages of renaissance style Hinks classified Caravaggio along with Karachi as a counter mannerist a provocative designation difficult to summarize it was intended to highlight the disintegrative quality of Caravaggio's compositions as opposed to the reintegrative quality of high baroque art but for Hinks the mannerist element was mainly psychological these were oops these were unbalanced skeptical earthbound artists and what of a nibble a carachi he asks surely another case of mannerist nervous collapse in a further entry he clarifies his aversion to Rembrandt a running theme throughout the diaries except for three works painted on either side of the artist's 1656 bankruptcy when Hinks describes this episode as the most embarrassed and unsettled moment of Rembrandt's private life he again recalls his own case and exclaims how great the consolations of genius in distress can be in his new yorker essay about Anthony Blunt the cleric of treason george steiner identifies a bizarre violence in the discipline of art history obsessive devotion to inanimate objects and abstruse issues that only a handful of other prying and rival colleagues care about steiner argues can secrete a rare venom into the spirit and foster a pathological need for cruelty this may be a grotesque caricature but as anyone who's been subject to an anonymous peer review can attest it's not too far off the mark there's another aspect to this violence having to do with the experience of time the antiquarian nature of the art historian's work produces an estrangement from the present and to some extent from reality the Mandarin scholar cuts himself off from ordinary humanity Hinks comes to similar conclusions in the journal he kept in Athens in 1956 in a state close to despair as he confronts the reality of his life his illusions about the history of art begin to crack reminding himself that he took only a second in the classical tripose at Trinity and that his career at the British Museum ended ignomally he reflects as a result of these two failures I have a resentment against my whole classical education and the false position in which I was placed thereby vis-à-vis classical antiquity it would have been very much better had I read modern languages at Cambridge or perhaps better still at Oxford and then gone into the department of prints and drawings or the V&A I should be there still and should have become a real scholar and an expert whereas I now live a life which has no real content a little less bad than a diplomats but without some of its solid worldly advantages well it is idle to repine over a misdirected life for me this is the climax of the diaries he admits that the fantasies art engendered were not enough yet he clings to the notion that elite institutions hold the key to a fulfilling life in fact his story reveals the opposite that the institutions we revere and that as ambitious young art historians we imagine will rescue us from the realities of our ordinary lives that will catapult us into a rarefied world of beauty and intellect are often lethal and ruinous in Athens Hings also confronts the reality of being a middle-aged gay man but typically he sublimates his feelings for example soon after arriving in Athens he gives a lecture on paters the renaissance in which he laments afterwards he failed to convey the central secret sense of what pater has always meant to me in one of the diaries most moving entries he recalls how as a student at Westminster I found in pater exactly the voice which echoed aloud my own secret enthusiasm it sounds like something from wilds the picture of dorian gray but in the context of this british council lecture he says it was too personal too private a meaning to share with an audience of uninformed indifferent people yet he recognizes it as a failure and realizes that the cultivation of a rich but secret inner life came at the expense of outward authenticity my pater had hardly a chance to glide out of the dark cupboard where I have kept him all these years he admits certainly a beautiful way of describing life in the closet he didn't share the best parts of himself in his work reflecting on Michelangelo's love affair with Tomasso Cavallieri he identifies with the artist who in his late 50s found a life affirming uranium romance traveling between Athens and Rome in the late 1950s he enacts his own personal quarrel of the ancients and the moderns by contrasting his bitter disillusion with Athens and rage against the philhalines with his enthrallment with Rome it is this interweaving of historical destinies this secular experience of abounding and being abased and then abounding again that I find so enthralling in Rome he swoon's what he's describing is his ability to experience the continuity of history in Rome whereas in Athens he feels estranged by the discontinuity of the ancient amid the squalid modern city there are parallels here to Vincoman in his yearning for a sublime experience expressed in terms of sexual ecstasy and mediated through classical antiquity to abound and be abased to return to Steiner's point this is the language of sadism after the despairing Athens interlude Hing's found greater equilibrium the remainder of the diary from 1959 to 1963 documents his many glamorous travels between Venice Paris London and Madrid visiting friends and seeing art this is one of the most art filled sections of the diaries careening between periods and styles often in the same entry the last entry in the published diary finds him in the academia in Venice anyway to be entirely alone in the Saint Ursula room for half an hour today kel joie the diaries in total present a way of doing art history divorced from institutions where the meaning of art is joined to human drama as a result of his own adventures or misadventures as it were Hing's finally understood that this was the more meaningful exploration it was in this last brief period of his life that he came closest to realizing a project he envisioned years earlier in 1947 and which he called simply the book in autobiography of enjoyment variations on a theme of the inward eye which is the bliss of solitude of course the diary is that book and Kenneth Clark is right it is literature thanks fascinating thank you so much to all three of our speakers for their and for their presentations I'm sure there are many questions in the room can I just start with I think more a little observation about something that I think strikingly tying all three papers together and that is the fact that many of these careers that we have been looking at not just today but also think of Ope yesterday had this strange split between the desired real life that somebody wants to achieve and the actual life that they have to live these these almost Janus phase element too too much of their work Williamson seem to have seem to have been quite at ease with himself but still I find the striking difference between this very academic work on miniatures and the more popular art writing that he published in editorial capacity I mean in Hing's case I think it's fairly obvious how this disillusionment with institutions created this almost internal split but also I think clearly in your case there was of course a serious academic credential behind all three of these women that in many of these cases was not able to be actually lived in their professional capacity so I'm wondering to what extent all three of you see that as a problem of institutions as in the case of Hing's perhaps or indeed in the other two cases maybe of the lack of institutions to what a degree are these unifying frameworks for an existence a help or a hindrance for these biographies that we've been looking at if you want to or whether you all want to respond to that a few thoughts yes and I agree with you that it's it's all connected and it's also heavily gendered in the cases that are presented there there is a the reality isn't that these women would have found a prestigious position in in german speaking countries that easily in any case so it's not like they they had illusions that were then smashed when they came they were already facing a certain differentiated reality to their male counterparts having to assert their right to study in universities it's only very recently that all these degrees were open to them so they were still in the pioneering phase when they had to leave Germany so they had to come to terms with almost a double loss the institutions that they left would never would never have been as welcoming to caricature you know the gender discrepancy as they were to their male colleagues anyway but they came to terms with the loss in different ways adapting and and changing gear or mourning and being constantly sadly frustrated so it's more like a yes the absence of institutions and the absence of opportunities to create a new institution for oneself in some cases i think well um think about williamson i think in a way it was there was he was never really challenged i mean that that in the way that's the absence of an institution but he managed to through publishing so much you know he was publishing a couple of books a year quite apart from the Morgan catalogs um he sort of set himself up as an expert and nobody really tried there is one review in the Athenaeum of his first book on Russell the pastel painter which which does contain you know quite a few references to the inaccuracy of some of the historical material there but apart from that review there's very little criticism and so he was able to sort of perpetuate this myth of his own expertise really and i think what happened was he became so tied up in in the collection of in the Morgan collection and the amount of money at his disposal to to really acquire things for that collection um and he's sort of run away with his own importance you know which creates an echo chamber in its own role exactly and because yes and because he's not in an academic framework there's nobody there saying to him well hang on yes i think it's a wonderful question and one that's not often i think for me i'm still like under the influence of this Steiner essay you know and um you know he he talks about this dynamic that exists not just in art history but uh within the humanities more generally and he contrasts it with work in the sciences um i mean we'd really have to test his argument i think but i think there's something to it and you've got numerous questions i think i've always been fascinated by people who like to be called doctor um i think beginning with dr johnson for whom there's no evidence that he had a doctorate and um the great archaeologist of county Durham um william greenwell who was called canon greenwell as well as dr greenwell but he was neither a canon full canon nor a doctor um and dr williamson who wrote an autobiography called the tale stories of an expert um um clearly not lacking in self-confidence um how did he get away with it do you think how did you establish that he was not a doctor and um i mean didn't people like morgan wonder about his expertise what was founded on well apparently not um it's very hard for us to sort of conceive now of how you could just get away with that but i think he just by self declaration you know he declared himself to be dr williamson and he's sometimes sometimes he puts um dr williamson sometimes he puts um d lit or in lit d but it appears to be his own invention and it um it's it's interesting because he wrote three memoirs altogether and you know he never he never says anything really anything about his education could i just ask a second verse into um did he ever write um the authentications for paintings was he employed by dealers at all um to um not really no no i think it he's a he's a bit before that period really yeah a fascinating story about former qualifications going back also to to op-haze the original of the enfield of uh lo shack yesterday it seems to be a bigger story to be told yeah um can i just follow up on nigel's point about about williamson because his his expert the his what what he seems to be claiming as his real expert expertise was less on paintings for which he where he wrote popular books have i got this wrong but more on on small scale um material climb plastic and jewellery and so on yes and that's what the big i always thought there was an inverse relationship between the the smallness of the objects and the largeness of the books but the but but in a sense he was presumably developing some sort of appearance of expertise anyhow in these areas presumably that that has to do with the the art trade i'm thinking of you know the sale of the spitzer collection and and and sorting by things from spitzer and that that whole world and the interest in in in those small scale objects and and presumably that's drawing on sort of german scholarship but did he have any german because father i know no he he you're right there's a sort of missing something missing he did focus on on yeah after russell so russell was his sort of book on bigger pictures yes which is i think again interesting to think about the popular art history that seems to have a very different domain than see the serious work about miniatures and so on so more in the English home and country life style which seems to have its own genre over here and that's oh oh sorry one online um i've studied williamson as soon as for a very long time um and uh found quite a lot about him i learned a lot in your excellent paper the miniature roy strung told told me is in the bna's collection and he once gave a lecture where he compared himself to this very portrait miniature and of course if you look at his most recent book one of the portraits he's been wearing of course he's a i mean roy strung is an academic and a very distinguished museum director still with us but he was also very much a showman and i think williamson was a showman there are letters by him in the juke of a clues archive which you know very well they're the most extraordinary performances of flattery and snobbery and self-professed expertise in no way can um can williamson be considered an academic he was a great compiler of lists i mean and this is the great feature of all his books and he's also a fantastic snob in his books where he describes meeting all the titled owners that he meets um but um blythe sobel who's the assistant curator at the um nelson at kins museum in kansas city where i've been recently doing it doing some work on the miniatures there a great collection she has seen all the letters in the morgan library um and she's doing some work on them and he was rumbled he was for fakes and also for overcharging and the brilliant librarian though there's been a lot of work on her with the black librarian who passed as white um bell to cost a green she was the one who rumbled him and that then got to morgan and he did die in 1913 and so he was his services were terminated um so there's an incredibly interesting story that is very interesting that that does kind of finish at that moment um he does continue to do these books after after after the second world war what my real question is is what happened to his own collection um because it was exhibited um you know during the first world war and it he also had a very important collection he seemed to acquire things from places that he visited and researched i mean i can't i can't add to that i don't i don't know what happened to his pictures the quality of snobbery cleaning is also a recurring theme though i think that is striking that somebody like hings also can model it himself probably to a degree on extravagant characters that populated the scene before him already what would you think yeah my sense of hings is that he was quite um a buttoned up kind of muted character but very opinionated and um within his his circle of friends and he was very much a part of of you know a certain set um i mean he i mean the extraordinary thing about the story for me is that he he comes out of the old boys club i mean he's one of them and um i mean he's sort of you know handpicked at the age of 23 um and set on a track at the British Museum and in the diary as the scandal around the cleaning of the marbles is unfolding he um and as i said he's disoriented it's very clear to the reader that he's being pushed out and that he's being scapegoated but even as that's happening he's still imagining that he can become eventually become keeper of Greco-Roman antiquities like he it's not dawning on him that you know he's being pushed off the cliff so you know what i'm saying hunts to your your point is like he's he's you know one of the old boys and um it only he's like slowly awakens to the fact and and comes out of this sort of culture of snobbery and you know event you know has this awakening uh at this moment um and it does sort of disabuse him to a certain extent um of you know the culture in which he's come out of but yes absolutely we've got a question online yes this is from someone online it's um i think more of a comment and it came in emily during your um presentation um and um the person david says i see some parallels in the immediate post war years and up to the late 1960s with the writing then on sculpture produced in britain between the 17th and the 19th centuries and we're doing some spanning of oh and i'm very sorry that the zoo um has just gone down so we will maybe leave that um tantalising comment hanging and um if it comes back on then i can um i'm going to say it's actually going into i was saying it's very malgun bacon territory it's just the sort of um the regrettable absence of of beccasino who i'm sure we're talking about mrs esther or whatever but but i i was thinking in terms of the the the the role of of of women um in in in british art history and so so there are your um emig emigres um but then there are also a number of women like margaret longhurst at the vna and um mary shamow writing about enamels and mrs christi writing about opazang the carnam and so on um so they weren't they weren't they they were writing important significant works but they weren't writing about painting so it's as if there was a space for women to writing things that were um somewhat marginal um relatively so but i don't know whether but was there any contact between your um emigre women and and these people in these other institutions um as far as i can tell yes uh through networks of so right as a helder and auto courts uh often worked as a couple indeed they the co-wrote things uh and but so through auto she had connections with with the barbell institute and again bing and other other people uh navigating around it um but she never had an official entry even though she did manage to publish some of scholarly work he'll the courts never got a position officially in the title as opposed to to her partner but it's yes we are barely scratching the surface of this topic so i'm going to ask you to repeat that list later and uh yes mary shamow indeed is one of our uh so i completely agree that they were uh looking at topics that have been left um sort of uncovered before but also um in terms of geographical areas um they were so mary shamow in particular so there was a work on Russian art for instance that had not been done in um so they brought uh their contribution to scholarship also by bringing to the surface other artistic movements and regions and that times very much with i can see the comment back and the names that are mentioned and i know again becky this connects with becky senior's work and um saying um again this work on um sculpture the 17th and 19th centuries um dominated by three remarkable women kathryn estail on the billiak um marjory web on risebrack and um margaret winney of the courthold institute on sculpture in britain more generally um and saying you know rupert garnis who might have been described as a gentleman scholar compiled the famous dictionary of sculptures in britain but that was more of a list of works and i think we're getting again we've heard of that that phrase used today as well what kind of what kinds of art history are we talking about um whereas you know these work of these women was was something um a little bit different and it'd be interesting to explore again their role and working on a marginalized field of british art um that came to be the province of these women absolutely yes uh thank you for a person online and thank you for your comments as well i would add to it so i i tried through a glimpse at the book on popular art to hint at the fact that they were also pioneering the study of design uh and and uh crafts uh and i would mention hillan gawson now's work on architectural history as well as new and groundbreaking uh when persnau arrived to britain he deployed the absence of art history but even more so the absence of his field as the history of architecture and indeed was now's work on um on french architecture on boole was was groundbreaking this time which is a fascinating point because a lot of this material on these these lower genres of course also hugs back to a more say antiquarian tradition as it was often pejoratively called which indeed has a very strong and important standing in britain especially also in the regions you know where you have surveys of all the different counties all the people who rub some inscriptions and document what's there so this this attempt at list making on from a from a bottom up level is is clearly very established in on on these aisles um and the more professional scholarship then such as the ones you've mentioned seem to continue on that track but yeah it's actually striking that the high art the fine art the painting department that that seems to be the one that that remains left out which is which is a quite quite peculiar british um omission I guess in the canon of art history even even hints you know it comes from classics of course it has a different training that brings them to the subject can I just add one thing about sorry oh right okay just one thing about hints I mean a question and a comment actually was part of the the the way he he he was the full guy in in the in the british museum cleaning scandal was there an element of homophobia there it was that because he he he was he he was perceived as not he may have been one of us in terms of his background but not otherwise um and that that that's a question the comment is that that the way he's been sort of forgotten um uh I he wrote an article in a french journal about rubiliac's Shakespeare and it it isn't even included in Aileen Dawson's wonderful and a very thorough catalogue of portrait sculpture in the bm it seems to have missed be missed it's as if I'm not saying she did that she certainly didn't do it deliberately but but but it is as if he disappeared even in terms of publications like that yes I think you very well could be on to something I mean I don't have a an answer specific answer but I think absolutely um there might have been some you know homophobia at play if if not that word I would say that it seems reasonable to say that uh john force died kind of identified a weakness in hinge's character or personality that he felt he could you know use um and this comes out in the diary I mean there is a certain sort of sediw mesochistic kind of strain that comes out in hinge's personality and I've wondered if you know force dyke at some of the other um big wigs at the british museum kind of identified this character trait and and used it and sort of pushed it um so that's absolutely I would say you're on to something there I just add a comment that um I'm not sure where I have read this or um whether it was in Canada or wherever but um I have a strong sense that the um scapegoating of hinge's um was very much recognised at the time and uh there was a sense that something must be done for him that he had been very unfairly treated and sort of phrase that comes to my mind is that he was um friends found him a post with the british council as um that needs something to keep him so together um but there was quite widespread support for him over the um basically being the full guy for ashmore and others yes um that's true um Clark I Kenneth Clark was you know a patron of his and as events were unfolding it was very clear to to people within the circle that you know he was being scapegoated and there was a kind of drive to find him a position which is how he lands at the warburg institute he takes up Anthony Blunt's spot uh Blunt moved just at that moment to the court hold uh so hinge moves to the warburg to take up on the spot uh Betsi Sears has written a wonderful article on that particular episode um and then he's at the at the warburg for less than a year and other friends you know sort of move him into the direction of the british council it's very interesting because he feels hinge feels at this moment this is around december 1940 he wants to bring warburgian principles and techniques uh to bear on the british council's work and as the war progresses he begins to you know he I feel like he tries to convince himself that the british council will have a large role to play you know in the rebuilding of you know european civilization uh after the war um my my take again is that he's really kind of trying to convince himself of of this and to create a sense of importance around the work because once he takes up the post in Rome in 1945 it very quickly becomes clear that he you know it just sends him into to you know a depressed depressive episodes and it's not the kind of grand uh work that he had imagined but you are correct I think we've got uh one or two more questions online then I think are you no no actually no we're good we're good no more questions then online okay in that case uh we have one last question in the room and um thank you thanks for the microphone thank you could I um just re revert to to hinge um I by chance doesn't work on his father whose own career is kind of I mean hinge recapitulates his father's dodgy career with respect to the astronomical society and then the royal geographical society so I'm wondering to what extent he sees this sort of difficulty in finding a secure place within an institution as a personal familial um a difficulty I mean obviously Arthur Hinks is involved with manly things like astronomy and Everest and so on and and so this and and and is barrett and heterosexual so there's no sort of really intimate problem there but nonetheless there's this sort of thing that your your own trajectory which has seen so secure in in an institution of note becomes um imperiling thanks I'm so glad you mentioned that um there are so many other details I wish I could have included and that was one of them Hinks's father as you said Arthur Hinks was the secretary of the royalist astronomy astronomical society and was pushed out of that role I think in 1913 um and it was a very messy nasty business and he then too kind of found a soft landing he became the secretary of the royal geographical society interestingly this doesn't come up in Hinks's diaries I thought it it would um he he seeks his father's advice you know as he's going through this experience but there's no acknowledgement in the diaries at least that his his father had you know kind of suffered a similar fate but I also you know noticed the similarity and found it remarkable but I you know it'd be interesting to to look a bit more into it um if there are letters or something like a little tidbit that creates in the documents that creates the connection fascinating there are indeed many broader longer timeframes and stories still to be covered and I'm sure we can cover some of them in the afternoon in our final round table I'd like to thank our three speakers again before we all make our way downstairs for a little comfort break and down there we will then distribute the group to have a little tour of the study room where you will have an opportunity to see some more objects from the OPE archive and library but also for those who wish to get another tour of the drawing room display which I'm sure many of you have already studied intently and which of course resonates very closely to some of the papers we heard yesterday so thank you again to our speakers and to all of you for your questions and indeed stamina over the last two hours um thank you