Damn him, how various he is!’, exclaimed Thomas Gainsborough of Joshua Reynolds. This dictum was applied to François Boucher in 1986 by Alastair and his two cocurators of the exhibition François Boucher 1703–1770, but it could equally be said of Alastair himself (without the ‘Damn him’). His expertise in paintings, drawings, sculpture, architecture and the history of collecting and patronage was exceptional. He was one of the most erudite and diligent art historians of his generation. His knowledge was encyclopaedic and its application was methodical and meticulous. He had an acute eye, an agile mind and a prodigious art-historical and visual memory. He was energetic in the pursuit of facts and shared his discoveries. He was trenchant with a dry sense of humour and generous with his time. A query would usually be answered by a memorandum written in his elegant Italianate hand. He eventually learned to use a computer. When he retired in 2012, he received a laptop installed with an earlier, but familiar, Windows system. 

Alastair was born on 5th August 1944 in Woking, Surrey, the middle child of Malcolm Laing, a civil engineer and (Margaret) Clare, neé Briscoe. He was educated at Bradfield College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read History (BA Hons 1966). He then took a Diploma in the History of Art (1967) transferring to the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where his PhD thesis on South German Rococo plasterwork was never completed. However, he contributed a pioneering 100-page chapter on Central and Eastern Europe to Baroque and Rococo: Architecture and Decoration (1978), edited by Anthony Blunt. 

His PhD led him to Czechoslovakia in 1968, where he met Hana Novotná, a neuropsychologist. She visited London in 1969, just before Czechoslovakia was closed for travel, staying with Alastair’s mother while he was in Munich. She left him a little note sandwiched between his books. He visited her a couple of times in the early seventies, and Hana was able to come to England in 1978. They were married a year later. Their son, Sam, studied Genetics and Linguistics and is a languages teacher. 

From 1976 to 1984, Alastair was a Researcher at the Heim Gallery, Jermyn Street, London, under the aegis of the Polish expatriate Count Andrew Ciechanowiecki, researching old masters, drawings and sculpture. Here he learned his trade, co-authoring a Heim exhibition catalogue on one hundred drawings from the Angers museums in 1977. As the gallery’s Getty archive indicates, Alastair made numerous international contacts with museum curators and collectors. 

His book Lighting (1982) was in a Victoria and Albert Museum series edited by Hugh Honour and John Fleming, which constituted ‘accessibly written works of charm and erudition’. After a stint at the Macmillan Dictionary of Art, Alastair was invited to collaborate with Pierre Rosenberg, then Senior Curator of Paintings at the Museé du Louvre, Paris, and Patrice Marandel, Curator of Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts, on the Boucher exhibition held in 1986–87 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Grand Palais, Paris. For the exhibition catalogue, Alastair wrote two chapters and the catalogue of paintings, 275 of 384 pages. He later described himself as a ‘laborious but copious author’. His eighty-five entries on the exhibited pictures are closely argued, with a wealth of detail on context, influences and comparable works. Shining through is the author’s curiosity about every aspect of a painting, its subject and its history. On the cover is one of Boucher’s most seductive images: The toilette of Venus (1751; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), commissioned by Madame de Pompadour. 

He thanked his wife, Hana, for her forbearance, admitting that ‘in my case the gratitude goes far beyond the conventional, since I am aware that my enthusiasm for the artist, and the need to do so much in so short a time, have kept me away from her’. 

Alastair was appointed Adviser on Paintings to the National Trust in April 1986. His first task was to help arrange an exhibition of Beatrix Potter drawings at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, in 1987, a far cry from Boucher. But Alastair was adaptable and gradually built up his expertise in new areas of study, such as British portraiture, on which he became a great authority. As he said in his 2013 retirement interview with Annette de Vries of CODART: 

I started as an Adviser on Pictures; the sculpture I myself added to my responsibilities [in 2002] [. . .] It was my duty to advise [. . .] on the hanging and rehanging of pictures, on acquisitions and lending, on conservation, cleaning and restoration [. . .] Most of my time, however, was devoted to the continuous process of cataloguing the pictures in the various historic houses and writing summaries for guidebooks’. 

His predecessor (1956–86) St John (‘Bobby’) Gore (1921–2010) published a list of paintings in National Trust houses as a supplement to this Magazine in April 1969 and several succinct catalogues.[1] Alastair declared that it was Gore’s 1965 exhibition at Wildenstein’s and its catalogue, The Art of Painting in Florence and Siena, 1250 to 1500, which ‘more than anything else [. . .] determined me to become an art historian’. 

The Trust’s 13,000 oil paintings are listed and illustrated in six Public Catalogue Foundation volumes (2013). They are also accessible online via the National Trust Collections and Art UK websites. Alastair calculated that eighty per cent of these paintings are portraits, offering considerable potential to an art historian who was interested in the history of the houses and the individual sitters, as well as the artists. Paramount, however, was his love of the great ancestral collections of old masters and British pictures in houses such as Petworth and Kingston Lacy. 

The zenith of his National Trust career came in 1995, the charity’s centenary year, when he organised In Trust for the Nation: Paintings from National Trust Houses, a major winter exhibition at the National Gallery, London. The Director, Neil MacGregor, wrote an enthusiastic preface to Alastair’s 256-page catalogue of the seventy-two exhibited pictures and Gazetteer of the twenty-nine houses and collections from which they derive. Each painting has a substantial scholarly entry with information on its history, provenance, exhibition and literature and a full-page colour photograph. The catalogue reflected the exhibition, where the pictures were hung according to the type of room in which they would have been displayed or by subject. Alastair exhibited the full range of paintings in National Trust houses, from masterpieces by Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Adam Elsheimer, Guercino, Anthony van Dyck, Diego Velázquez, Claude, Rembrandt, Aelbert Cuyp, Pompeo Batoni, Bernardo Bellotto and J.M.W. Turner et al. to two portraits of outdoor servants at Erddig, Jan Wyck’s image of a mastiff at Dunham Massey and views of industrial workings by Henry Hawkins and Benjamin Williams Leader. There was a single Boucher, one of his favourites, an early pastoral titled La vie champêtre (Fig.1), which was listed at Belton in 1776 and sold in 1929. It was bequeathed to the Trust in 1993 by Mrs Martha Sklatz and returned to the house. Alastair described her as ‘angelic’ for her generosity. 

His interest in the historic display of paintings, evident in the National Gallery exhibition catalogue, equipped Alastair for his advisory role in several re-arrangements of collections along historical lines, including Stourhead, Petworth and Osterley (Fig.2). The Trust then wisely involved outside luminaries in such enterprises. Anthony Blunt was the first Hon. Adviser on Paintings and was succeeded by Brinsley Ford. Both belonged to the Arts Panel, formed by Bobby Gore, which advised on the display of the Trust’s houses and collections. Alastair ex officio attended the Panel’s visits to houses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

Alec Cobbe, a quondam Arts Panel member and Alastair’s Oxford contemporary at Corpus, transformed the Trust’s house designed by Robert Adam at Hatchlands Park, for the display of his picture collection. When Cobbe’s paintings were exhibited at Kenwood in 2001–02, the accompanying 384-page catalogue Clerics and Connoisseurs: An Irish Art Collection through Three Centuries was edited by Alastair, who contributed a chapter on ‘Alec Cobbe as a Collector’. Unlike Alec, Alastair never wanted to form a collection of his own. He and Hana held a party at Hatchlands to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. 

In 2003, with an introduction by Pierre Rosenberg, Alastair produced The Drawings of François Boucher to accompany a Boucher drawings exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York. His magnum opus on Boucher, which would require five more years work, began as a catalogue raisonné of the drawings but now includes the paintings and everything else by this immensely prolific artist, whose ‘inexhaustible fecundity’ Alastair so admired. The great work is now in the capable hands of his assistants Jamie Mulherron (pictures and designs for tapestries) and Laure-Aline Griffith-Jones, née Démazure (drawings). 

Documentation swamped Alastair’s Islington house. On 19th November 2022, Hana wrote to a friend: ‘It would be lovely to see you but I would have to persuade Alastair to deal with his piles of Boucher and Chardin to free the dining chairs, otherwise there will not be room for you to sit’. It was Alastair’s wish that his books and papers would be deposited in the archive at his adored Waddesdon Manor, where he was on the Academic Committee from its inception in 1993. Chaired by the late Lord (Jacob) Rothschild, the committee’s other founder members were Neil MacGregor and Geoffrey de Bellaigue. On hearing of Lord Rothschild’s death earlier this year, Alastair praised him for ‘the way in which he took on the legacy of Waddesdon from Dolly de Rothschild [and] ensured that it did not go into a slow decline, because of the lack of funds to sustain it in peak condition; he made it into the jewel of the crown of the Trust’s houses’. Lord Rothschild’s last purchase for Waddesdon was an early Guercino of Moses.[2] Alastair suggested that it may depict him raising his hands, thus enabling Joshua to defeat the Amalekites (Exodus 17:8–16). He was pleased to hear from Lord Rothschild that the Chief Rabbi agreed with this interpretation. 

For the two-volume catalogue of Edmond de Rothschild’s drawings at Waddesdon, Drawings for Architecture Design and Ornament, published by the Alice Trust in 2006, Alastair wrote the fifty-two entries on German drawings and with Martin Meade, divided the entries on the 460 French drawings. The Waddesdon object files are full of letters in Alastair’s distinctive handwriting, proof that he lived and breathed his expertise. He published in this Magazine, of which he was a director and trustee, as well as Apollo. 

Alastair sat on numerous committees including the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art (1996–2002) and the Acceptance in Lieu Committee (1994–2005). He was a member of the Travellers Club and of the Society of Dilettanti. He became a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988 and in 2020 received from the Académie Française the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises. He did not allow his bouts of illness to dampen his enthusiasm. He was a distinguished colleague and a valued friend who will be sorely missed. One can only hope that as a fitting tribute to the world expert on the artist, his grand projet on Boucher will posthumously see the light.

[1] S.J. Gore: ‘Pictures in National Trust houses’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 111 (1969), pp.237–62. 

[2] For more on this work, see L. Treves: ‘Guercino’s “Moses”: a recent addition to the artist’s “prima maniera”’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 166 (2024), pp.912–19.