ABSTRACT
My father was Keeper of the Prints and Drawings Department at the British Museum. He had an eye. Not just any eye, but ‘a better eye … than anyone else alive today’. 1 This last comment was made, in conversation with a friend of my father’s, by the art historian Kenneth Clark. The comment was presumably inspired by conversations between the two about the works of art on the walls of Clark’s apartment. Taken at face value, Clark’s comment perfectly encapsulates a certain kind of art history and the assumptions of elitism and superiority it embodied. In case this sounds overly critical, these are qualities that both Lord Clark and my father would have fully endorsed and supported. By ‘anyone else alive today’ Clark of course did not mean literally the full complement of living humanity, but rather the few score connoisseurs of art, among whom he counted both himself, and on the evidence above, my father. By ‘a better eye’ he meant a capacity to look carefully at works of art, drawings especially, and in particular to be able to make attributions on the grounds of style. To be a connoisseur was to be part of a tradition established ‘without the aid of photography, teams of graduate students, Witt libraries and other modern amenities now taken for granted’ which involved the ‘scientific and methodical study of an artist’s drawings considered as essential elements in the construction and assessment of his work as a whole’. 2 The last two quotations come from my father’s introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, devoted to the connoisseurial achievement of his mentor and colleague Philip Pouncey, but they can also stand as a self-portrait of a self-confessed connoisseur and even a manifesto of connoisseurship. To possess an eye, as my father reputedly did, required, according to my father’s own prescription, ‘a particular combination of qualities of mind, some more scientific than artistic and others more artistic than scientific: a visual memory for compositions and details of compositions, exhaustive knowledge of the school or period in question, awareness of all the possible answers, a sense of artistic quality, a capacity for assessing evidence, and a power of empathy with the creative processes of each individual artist and a positive conception of him as an individual artistic personality’. 3
