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September 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1362

Obituary: Hugh Honour (1927—2016)

By Nicholas Penny

HUGH HONOUR was born in Eastbourne on 26th September 1927 and was brought up in Sussex. His father, Herbert Percy Honour, together with his uncle George, ran the silverplating firm of George Gates Honour & Sons (successor, in 1900, to Eastborn and Honour of Hatton Garden, a partnership established around 1880). In his later years Hugh sometimes speculated on the influence this may have had on his interest in the decorative arts and on the way objects are made. It may have influenced him in other respects, notably a determined self-reliance. The business was precarious. ‘My father made a great many duck presses, for which, as you can imagine, there was little demand after the war’. He filed for bankruptcy in 1929. Hugh’s brother, his only sibling, eleven years his senior, was itching to modernise the business, but as soon as he took control it went under. It was finally wound up in 1936. The brother then moved to ‘the wrong part of Portugal’ and out of Hugh’s life.

 

At King’s School, Canterbury, in the shadow of the great cathedral, and in Cornwall where he was evacuated during part of the War, Hugh considered a career as an architect. He chose instead to read English Literature at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, going up in 1946. He was guided in this decision, he liked to think, by the ghost of the most distinguished of the old boys of King’s School, Walter Pater. Just how Paterine the young Honour was is not certain. But when the present writer arrived at ‘Cats’ twenty or so years later, the Yeats scholar Tom Henn, then an English tutor, mentioned that Honour had been a student there, describing him – after searching for the most appropriate loaded epithet – as ‘rather aesthetic’. Hugh’s love and knowledge of English literature was very great, and only a few months before his death he had by heart the endings of at least four of Matthew Arnold’s poems.

 

After Cambridge, Hugh worked briefly in the Print Room of the British Museum as an unpaid attaché to Edward Croft-Murray, cataloguing English drawings, and then took a job at Leeds City Art Gallery as an assistant to Clifford Musgrave, the director from 1947 to 1997 and the authority on Regency furniture. Upon hearing this news, Hugh’s mother, Dorothy Margaret (née Withers), behaved as if he were setting off for Nigeria, so alien did the industrial North then seem to the genteel inhabitants of the home counties. But Hugh ‘rather took to it’ (as he would also have done, he added, had Leeds really been in Nigeria) and he especially took to the museum’s annexe, Temple Newsam House, with its notable collection of furniture and decorative arts. Leeds was becoming a centre for research in these areas and, to promote this, Hugh edited the Leeds Arts Calendar, a quarterly review. This lasted a couple of years (and was later revived) – the first manifestation known to us of his talent as an editor.

 

Hugh stayed in Leeds for a year and a half (1953–54) but he wanted to travel and soon set off for Greece and Sicily in the company of John Fleming,1 an older friend (born in 1919) whom he had met in Cambridge. John was employed to read aloud to Percy Lubbock (Henry James’s disciple, by then nearly blind) in his villa at Lerici. Hugh joined him, helping with the reading, the playing of gramophone records and the task of keeping Percy company. In 1957 they escaped from this luxurious incarceration and rented a house in Asolo from Freya Stark. In that year Hugh’s first book was published, a study of Horace Walpole, number 92 in the series ‘Writers and their Work’ sponsored by the British Council. In Asolo they both settled down to writing books for John Murray. Hugh’s was Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (published in 1961), which reflected his interest in the decorative arts – the history of ornament, the sub-currents of taste and the encounters, often accompanied by creative misinterpretation, between distant civilisations. Later, the book’s title made it difficult for him to obtain a visa to visit the USSR.

 

A year after the publication of this book, John and Hugh purchased the Villa Marchiò at Tofori, an eighteenth-century hunting lodge with a walled garden, farmhouses and olive groves, hidden in the hills north of Lucca. Such a property could then be acquired for much less than a semi-detached house in a London suburb. There they lived together until John’s death in 2001. In Italy, they could limit distractions and control expenses, as well as escape from the prejudices and weather of Britain. They were both industrious and ambitious, combining relatively remunerative journalism with pioneering scholarship. One of the books they planned to write together was a survey of Italian eighteenth-century sculpture to match the work Berenson had undertaken on Italian Renaissance painting, and both wrote articles in the 1960s, mostly for The Connoisseur and Apollo, that were intended to be preparatory for this. Some of these were hugely influential. The research behind the fashion for small bronze statuettes after the antique that Hugh published in 1961 and 1963 inspired many investigations of the taste generated by the Grand Tour in the following decades. Hugh’s depth of knowledge and the range of his sympathies are most obviously displayed in his Companion Guide to Venice of 1965, one of the best books of its kind, reprinted for over thirty years. 

 

Hugh and John were co-authors with Nikolaus Pevsner of the Penguin Dictionary of Architecture that appeared in 1966 and in five subsequent editions over more than thirty years. And they had already begun to work as both editors and authors for Penguin books: Hugh’s Neo-classicism (1968) and his Romanticism (1979) were among the finest in the ‘Style and Civilisation’ series (the most successful of the three series they initiated for Penguin, the others being the ‘Architect and Society’ and ‘Art in Context’). A far more modest enterprise was undertaken by Hugh and John for the Victoria and Albert Museum and HMSO: a series of slim volumes entitled ‘The Arts and Living’, which included Going to Bed by Eileen Harris of 1981 and Lighting by Alastair Laing of 1982, and other accessibly written works of charm and erudition, now much sought after but long out of print.

 

Canova, the hero of Hugh’s Neo-classicism and a key figure for any historian of the art of Venice, had reacted against the Baroque sculptors whom Hugh and John had studied. He came increasingly to be the focus of Hugh’s research, and in March and April 1972 Hugh published in this Magazine the two-part article on Canova’s studio practice that completely altered common assumptions about the sculptor by emphasising the surface texture and sensuous warmth of his work. In the same year his article on Canova’s sculptures of Venus, published in this Magazine, 114 (1972), pp.658–70, together with his entries in the catalogue of The Age of Neo-classicism, the great Council of Europe exhibition held in the winter of 1972 at both the Royal Academy and the Victoria and Albert Museum (Hugh served on both the Steering Committee and International Committee), made it clear that he could – and we believed would – write the much-needed monograph on this artist that he had agreed to write some years previously.

 

A major obstacle to the sustained application required for the completion of such a work came from Hugh’s many other commitments. By 1972 he had published two volumes in the ‘Great Craftsmen’ series: Goldsmiths and Silversmiths and Cabinet Makers and Furniture Designers. In 1974 he wrote The New Golden Land to accompany the main exhibition for the American bicentennial of 1976, The European Vision of America, which he curated for the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Before that he had agreed to compile (with John’s assistance) the Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts (1977), an astonishing achievement that could not now be compiled by fewer than half a dozen scholars. It includes authoritative entries on minor ceramic factories, as well as the greatest innovators in the manufacture of porcelain; on Asian lacquer as well as the invention of scagliola; on buhl as well as papier-mâché. Hugh and John could not afford to ignore financially rewarding commissions, especially any that promised to provide for them in future decades. 

 

The proposal made by John Calmann, soon after Penguin had passed into new management, that they should write the World History of Art was impossible to resist. Published by Laurence King in 1982, it was a huge success, receiving the Mitchell Prize and establishing itself as a textbook for undergraduate students of art history throughout the world, especially in North America (where it was published as The Visual Arts: A History). Keeping it up to date was hard work, but Hugh also managed to write the two books of Volume IV in the series The Image of the Black in Western Art (1989) and, with John, The Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler and Sargent (1991).

 

The World History of Art in its frequent and successive editions may be criticised for the way it incorporates every new trend in modern art and cunningly avoids, especially in its later chapters, any collision with new academic art historiography, thus ensuring that no one on the faculty would feel it to be dangerous or outdated. Hugh and John took careful advice on this, and a certain suspension of their own critical independence was essential for the book’s success. However, an open mind concerning the new, as well as the alien, was highly characteristic of them. There was, at first, strong and even racist resistance from American publishers to any venture into Asia, Africa or South America, but they insisted from the start on the global reach of the book, thus anticipating, and surely also influencing the embrace of multicultural diversity now so routinely and piously insisted on in universities and museums.

 

With each new edition of the World History of Art the coverage of non-European civilisations grew in assurance and discernment as the authors improved their knowledge by travel. In the Villa Marchiò, Chinese bamboo painting was placed near William Morris’s medievalising textile and an Iznik tile. A Gandharan Buddhist relief in schist joined the Baroque marble Virgin and Child by Plura (now in the Holburne Museum, Bath) and the Neo-classical marble relief by John Deare. By the 1990s Hugh preferred to wear short-sleeved collarless shirts. When he and John made their annual visit to London they listened to Indian (a friend believes it was Cambodian) pop music during the car journey. And they must have been among the only people to eat both in the clubs of St James’s and in the earliest Wagamama in London.

 

Despite their disciplined lives, Hugh and John were always happy to receive friends who could find their way to Villa Marchiò and to relax with them over coffee or tea, or a Bloody Mary (made by Hugh from home-grown tomatoes) in the limonaia beside the lotus pond. They relished hearing about the misdeeds and failings of friends and enemies. John, with his higher voice and greater love of mischief, would lament a protégé’s fall from grace: ‘You see, Hugh [pronounced Heeew] found him rather tedious’. Hugh would arrive with a tray and drawl, ‘We did find him AWFULLY boring’ but then add ‘we thought SHE was rather nice, actually’. Fellow expatriates were often liable to excommunication. They did not care for the court of ‘BB’ (although they frequented I Tatti when their friend Walter Kaiser became director there). And Harold Acton was considered to be ‘impossible’ after he became (as they believed) infatuated with royalty. They themselves were sometimes ostracised – for a decade by John Pope-Hennessy because they had observed in print that, when pursuing old altarpieces in Tuscan hill towns, he did not neglect ‘the local flora and fauna – especially the fauna’. 

 

By about 1995, when his health began to suffer, John’s portion of the domestic tasks in Villa Marchiò had shrunk to a little correspondence, the selection of CDs and the planning of their travels (thenceforth less frequent). He was also supposed to answer the telephone. Hugh paid the bills and did the cooking, shopping, driving and gardening. At the end of the day Hugh delivered tea and pensively poured their cat, Timmy, into John’s lap. After John’s death in 2001 Hugh continued with Paolo Mariuz to edit Canova’s letters, and he wrote judicious reviews for the New York Review of Books, but he never found the energy to complete the great book on Canova. By 2010 his heart was failing. Driving was forbidden, walking gradually became impossible, and concentration on books or music was increasingly difficult. Lucia, the housekeeper for many decades, assumed a larger role, competing in her attentions to ‘Il Signorino’ (as she had always called Hugh, whose name no Italian could ever pronounce) with Saman, who lifted Hugh into and out of his chair and generally cared for him.

 

Saman began to play cricket for Lucca, and exuberant trophies of cheap alloy and dubious taste began to overshadow the rare porcelain and maiolica on the chimneypiece. ‘I do rather wish he wouldn’t do so well’, Hugh sighed, recalling the cult of games that he had endured at school seventy years earlier. Meanwhile, the garden grew wilder (Hugh not trusting anyone to prune it) and then had to be hacked ruthlessly back. A few of the exotic luxuries cherished throughout his frugal life remained: Yunnan tea, dark chocolate and Turkish cigarettes. He smoked incessantly. ‘I think you’ve dropped ash on your trousers’. ‘I dare say I have’. ‘I don’t want you to go up in smoke’. ‘I’m always going up in smoke’, he replied with a sad smile, looking wistfully at the tracings from the low reliefs in Han tombs that flanked the Buddha of Healing above the cricket trophies. He died on 20th May after a brief stay in hospital.

 

Because Hugh lived abroad and had preserved a manner of speaking English associated with clubland in the middle of the last century, perhaps also because he knew so much about jugs and rugs and rare shrubs, he was sometimes mistaken for a gentleman amateur with a ‘private income’. He was in fact an industrious professional, working in partnership not only with John Fleming but with packagers and publishers. His achievement was dependent on an extensive network of friends and contacts of all ages in museums and universities of many countries. The public he reached grew with the expansion of university education in art history. He had no need to undertake original and ‘primary’ scholarly research, but he had a great appetite for it and it enabled him to transform the reputation of one of the greatest of all European artists. He was however unable to complete the great academic study that was expected of him. The lucid exposition of what he loved most, be it Song dynasty painting or modern architecture of the early twentieth century, has never been surpassed. His succinct synthesis of current knowledge in dozens of different fields will always be found to be as reliable as it is elegant. Much of what he wrote, not only in dictionary entries but in the World History or in travel guides, could be given a new life on a website. He himself never consulted one.

 

NICHOLAS PENNY

 

 

I N. Penny: Obituary: John Fleming (1919–2001) in this Magazine, 143 (2001), pp. 694–5.