Benedict Nicolson, editor of this Magazine from 1947 to 1978, was an astute talent spotter. In 1975 he invited Nicholas Goodison to join the editorial board, writing in a letter to him that ‘We all felt you would be an ideal person to help us, since there is nobody on the Board with your expert knowledge of the applied arts, or indeed with your knowledge of finance’. Even Nicolson could not have anticipated the exceptionally high profile that Goodison would develop on the basis of those twin talents. A leading figure in the City of London for half a century, following his appointment in 1976 as the youngest ever chairman of the Stock Exchange, Goodison, who died on 6th July at the age of eighty-seven, played a central part in the deregulation of the financial markets in 1987 known as the Big Bang. At the same time he was an outstanding scholar of the applied arts. He published several books on art and design in eighteenth-century Britain, among them the standard works on Matthew Boulton and on English barometers 1680–1860, together with many articles, not least in the Burlington, of which he was for many years chair. Among his achievements was helping to secure the magazine’s future at a turning point in its history. 

Born in what he described as ‘suburban Hertfordshire’ in 1934, Goodison followed his father into the family stockbroking firm, founded by his grandfather. He attributed his early interest in the arts to his education at Marlborough College and King’s College, Cambridge, where he read Classics. A fellow undergraduate’s recording of Tristan und Isolde was the beginning of a lifelong love of opera and his enthusiasm for eighteenth-century clocks and barometers was sparked by studying the outstanding timepieces by Thomas Tompion given to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, by S.E. Prestige in 1947.

Goodison came to the Burlington through the Furniture History Society (FHS), founded in 1964. He and his wife, Judith – they married in 1960 – were among its earliest members and Judith has had a distinguished career as a furniture historian, sharing with Nicholas a particular interest in Thomas Chippendale. Since the FHS had no adequate funds for publishing the catalogue written by Goodison with Lindsay Boynton of the furniture supplied by Chippendale for Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, which was intended for a special issue of its journal to be published in 1968 to mark the 250th anniversary of Chippendale’s birth, Nicolson offered to help. As a result, the journal printed the archival documents and the Burlington published the catalogue itself. Nicolson’s hope that this venture would help to diversify the magazine’s contents bore fruit in the November 1969 issue, written by members of the FHS and dedicated to European furniture, which included Goodison’s first independent contribution to the magazine, a Shorter Notice on Boulton’s ormolu door furniture. His many subsequent articles and reviews, on subjects that ranged from Christopher Dresser to Josef and Anni Albers, came full circle in his last contribution, a reflection on fifty years of Chippendale scholarship, published in 2018 to mark the designer’s tercentenary.

When Goodison began his association with the Burlington it was part of the Thomson family’s commercial empire. The company’s decision in 1981 to sell its most celebrated asset, The Times newspapers, marked a change of direction, away from publishing. In 1986, with Goodison’s encouragement, the trustees began to raise funds to provide an independent life for the magazine. Goodison played a key role in determining the governance of the charitable foundation to which Thomson transferred ownership of the magazine for a nominal sum in 1991 and it was in part thanks to him that the Burlington took advantage of the slump in the property market in the early 1990s to buy the freehold of a small house in Duke’s Road, Bloomsbury. With the other trustees, notably the eminent dealer Jack Baer, Goodison helped the managing director, Kate Trevelyan, and Editor, Caroline Elam, launch the appeal for the endowment that secured the magazine’s long-term future.

Throughout this time Goodison was at the forefront of the upheavals to the City that were to win him a knighthood in 1982. Tall, elegant, donnish in manner and drily witty, he was not a typical financial personality of the 1980s. On one hand he was on the board of British Steel and was chair of the banking group TSB; on the other he was chair of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Art Fund. In 2004 he delivered to the Treasury a highly influential report, Securing the Best for our Museums, which made wide-ranging recommendations for encouraging the donation of works of art to public collections. A major preoccupation in Goodison’s later life was the collection of contemporary British crafts that he and Judith gave to the Fitzwilliam Museum from 1997 onwards. This was an interest that he traced back to an article by Richard Morphet published in the Burlington in 1976 defending the Tate’s acquisition of Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (the then-notorious ‘Bricks’) and he took pleasure in acknowledging this unlikely debt to the magazine that he did so much to encourage and sustain and where he will be deeply missed.