THE DEATH OF Anita Brookner on 10th March brought forth an unsurprisingly extensive response. She had, as a novelist, reached a wider audience than most art historians can command, but one was pleased to find, in the more formal tributes and in blogs, recollections of students who had experienced her teaching at the Courtauld Institute between 1964 and 1988. Among her catchphrases in those days was the admonitory ‘It should not be forgotten that . . .’. Ironically, so distinctive was her teaching style, that there was little danger of us forgetting it.

Some of her evident determination to excel as a teacher may have stemmed from the boredom she had experienced during her BA History course at King’s College, London, where she enrolled shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War. Although she came out of it with a first in 1949, the chief attraction, we are told, was the proximity of King’s to the National Gallery. Her next move was to register for an MA at the Courtauld under Anthony Blunt. Her report on the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze was commuted to a Ph.D., and a French government scholarship enabled her to pursue Greuze on his home ground, backed also, she tells us, by Jean Adhémar of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and his wife, Hélène, at the Louvre. To a friend, the author Julian Barnes, she recalled that the happiest time of her life had been travelling round twenty-six French provincial art galleries ‘by bus in a fog’. Her thesis, which includes a pioneering account of the cult of sensibility, is, by contrast, a marvel of lucidity. The choice of Greuze was a strategic one, placed as he was on the cusp between what was still in those days referred to as ‘Rococo painting’ and the development of a more severe Neo-classicism. The fact that his modern moral subjects grated on twentieth-century sensibilities dictated the requisite historical detachment. The thesis was boiled down to two articles for The Burlington Magazine in the June and July issues of 1956, before being tweaked again for publication in book form in 1972.

After the doctorate, there followed a decade of highly productive art-historical dog’s bodying. A typescript Iconography of Cecil Rhodes (1956), a copy of which can be found in London University Library, Senate House, was commissioned by the Rhodes Trustees, and will have helped to keep the wolf from the door if nothing else. The year before, she had cut her journalistic teeth at the Burlington, lamenting, in her first book review, ‘the increasing stylelessness of writings on art history’. It was a declaration of intent, and her reports on exhibitions in France, Belgium and London and numerous book and exhibition reviews gave her ample scope to display her powers of description. The reports are never mealy-mouthed and cover everything from Paleolithic to Pop. At the same time she was earning money as a translator both from French and Italian. In his foreword to the 1959 exhibition catalogue accompanying the Arts Council’s Romantic Movement, Kenneth Clark thanked her for her ‘untiring services’ as a translator. That was the year in which she began her teaching career, as a visiting lecturer at Reading University.

It is possible that the lectures we heard at the Courtauld in the mid-1960s had already been trialled at Reading. The effect of them was magical. The Brookner voice, happily preserved in an interview with Sue MacGregor, was somewhat fruity and patrician, but without the strangulated vowels of her Courtauld contemporary, Brian Sewell. The vigorous professionalism of her delivery, as if from a trained actress, was an object lesson for the timorous neophyte. She knew how to draw her students out, and when necessary administer a timely kick up the pants. I still have a letter from her that ends with a capitalised ‘GET MOVING’.

The tone of her lectures is best preserved in her short and unpretentious 1967 volume on Watteau, published by Hamlyn. She was not above such popularising endeavours. It had been preceded by a similar slim volume on Ingres (1965), and she provided the voiceover for several of Edwin Mullins’s televised ‘Great Paintings’ (1981–82). Brookner left to her friend Michael Levey the task of summarising the art of eighteenth-century France. Her own survey, as purveyed to her students, can now only be reconstituted from scattered articles and reviews. When dealing with a century that witnessed a major artistic turnaround, she managed the trick of keeping a foot in both camps, as she boasted to the staunchly rococophile Levey in an open letter published in this Magazine in May 1967. Her personal vindication of Jacques-Louis David as a great painter with a flawed personality, eventually saw the light of day in her monograph on him published in 1980. After a somewhat diffuse introduction, this resolves itself into a finely sustained interweaving of biography, political history and artistic interpretation. Brookner’s refusal to condone David’s revolutionary activities, as well as her apolitical reading of the Oath of the Horatii, irked some left-leaning ‘new’ art historians. She did not crumble under attack, defending her position in a review of Thomas Crow’s Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century France, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (29th November 1985).

By that time, she was well launched on her career as a novelist. The transition from art history to fiction had been anticipated in her chief contribution to what Robert Rosenblum has described as art history’s effort to give the nineteenth century back to itself. This was her series of essays on French art criticism, first conceived as a lecture series for the Courtauld, and then delivered as the Slade Lectures at Cambridge in 1967–68. Brookner never converted to full-blown nineteenth-century revisionism, what she dismissively called ‘the trend towards the documentation of bad art and its hinterland’. Her Francocentricity still linked her to the old school, and it has been claimed that the series, published as The Genius of the Future (1971), is in the end a story of rendez-vous manqués between select literary luminaries and already canonical painters. She would have acknowledged the truth of this. Nevertheless, these sparkling essays pleasurably parade Brookner’s hard-won familiarity with her authors’ largely novelistic oeuvres, as well as bringing to light a number of ‘brief encounters’ between pen and brush. They charted a much needed byway to the stultifying march to modernism that was the standard fare of teaching on the nineteenth century in England at the time. Some of the essays were reworked for Romanticism and its Discontents (2000). With Alfred de Musset and Théophile Gautier now thrown into the mix, the emphasis here was on art as a solution to the existential problem in a godless age.

Critical opprobrium may have been par for the course in academic life, but in 1987, a year before her final retirement from the Courtauld, Brookner was shocked to learn that she had been used as a stooge by Anthony Blunt and Peter Wright of MI5. In his memoir, Spycatcher (1987), Wright claimed that she had unwittingly carried information from one of Blunt’s ex-couriers, the art historian Phoebe Pool, as part of an immunity deal with the security services. Following Blunt’s exposure, she had remained loyal to him, to the extent of voting in a University of London convocation in 1980 against the removal of his professorship, but this struck her as an act of treachery on a personal level. In the long term, however, her deep sense of indebtedness to Blunt appears to have outlived any rancour that this revelation caused. 

I cannot help recalling Brookner’s statement that, for the brothers Goncourt, the only good woman was a dead woman, around whom they could weave their nostalgic web. Perhaps, happily, space has not allowed for a more effusive tribute of this kind.