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October 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1363

Bruce Laughton (1928–2016)

BRUCE LAUGHTON, who died in Canada aged eighty-eight on 18th January 2016, was one of a select group of writers on British and French nineteenth- and twentieth-century art who brought to their academic studies a deep knowledge of painting as a craft. Following the path established by Adrian Stokes a generation earlier, several – among them John Golding and Lawrence Gowing – pursued intertwined careers. A connection to William Coldstream was a common denominator. Coldstream was the primary force behind the establishment of the Euston Road School in the 1930s. After the War, its teachers went on to teach at Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. At the Slade during the 1950s, in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute of Art and often to the dismay of Slade students, Coldstream introduced art history lectures on a Friday evening. As principal of Chelsea School of Art and later of the fine art department of Leeds University, Gowing also introduced history of art courses for his students. He recruited Stephen Chaplin, who had spent three years at the Slade followed by three at the Courtauld, to his staff both at Chelsea and Leeds.

Laughton’s path as a student hints at initial hesitancy. On leaving Bryanston School in 1945 – where his chief interests had been fine art and rowing – he attended classes at Camberwell. In 1946 he went up to Oxford to read English at Queen’s College, graduating in 1949. He then returned to Camberwell for a further three years. Coldstream, Gowing, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers were among his tutors. When Coldstream was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1951, Laughton and Mary Orde Shields, a fellow student at Camberwell, enrolled at the Slade (he part-time). They married in 1953. Through the 1950s and 1960s he continued to paint, and occasionally exhibit, his cool, measured and poetic landscapes with the London Group (Fig.IV); in 1966 he had a one-man exhibition in Woodbridge Art Gallery, Suffolk. The next fixed point in Laughton’s professional life was a two-year stint as a Museum Assistant at Birmingham City Art Gallery (1954–56). In 1957 he joined the staff of the Courtauld as a photographic librarian and became, almost by default in that environment, an art historian.

A modest, self-effacing man with a marked stutter, it took time for Laughton’s peers to notice this new presence at the Courtauld. Supervised by Alan Bowness, he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Philip Wilson Steer. In 1969 he contributed an introduction to the catalogue of Channel Packet: Paris–London 1880–1920, an exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London. But his breakthrough as an art historian came in 1971 when he organised and wrote the perceptive catalogue introduction to an exhibition in the Royal Academy Diploma Galleries marking the centenary of the Slade School, and his Philip Wilson Steer was published. This book was a marker of things to come. It introduced the study of a British artist of relatively modern vintage using the rigorous Courtauld method hitherto reserved for painters from mainland Europe. In revising the chronology of Steer’s work proposed twenty-five years earlier by D.S. MacColl (1945), Laughton’s training as a painter was crucial. Documentary evidence was tested against technical analysis. Laughton used his skill as a meticulous scholar in liaison with his professional understanding of how a painter develops his style and handling. He established that Steer’s 1886–94 shimmering visions of fragile girls by the sea were not brilliant flukes, but deliberate examples of the current European preoccupation with the division of brushwork, tones and colours. It was also in 1971 that Laughton left London to teach at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He retired officially in 1993, having progressed over the years to become head of the Department of Art and a full professor. He continued to teach part-time until 2004, and remained in Kingston until his death. He is survived by Doris, his second wife whom he had married in 1973, and by the two children of his first marriage.

In Canada, Laughton continued to write and conduct research. In The Euston Road School (1986) and William Coldstream (2004) he drew upon his own experience and contacts to construct books of unparalleled authority. He had access to the private letters, journals and recollections of most of the principals. He understood the what, the why and the how of their achievements. He could describe paintings without resorting to jargon. He never attempted the interpretation of paintings of the past to conform to fashionable theories of the present. However, alongside his dedicated documentation of the history of British art within his own ambit, he was drawn again and again to mid-nineteenth-century France, in particular to J.-F. Millet and Honoré Daumier. Yale University Press published The Drawings of Daumier and Millet in 1991 and Honoré Daumier in 1996. Several of his most intriguing pieces of original research appeared in this Magazine. ‘Millet’s “Hagar and Ishmael”’(November 1979) discussed the abortive genesis and later disclosure of the painting (Mesdag Collection, The Hague); ‘Millet’s “Wood sawyers” and “La République” rediscovered’(January 1992), co-authored with the conservator Lucia Scalisi, disentangled the circumstances whereby Millet painted the Wood sawyers (Victoria and Albert Museum) over a hitherto lost oil sketch for La République; ‘J.-F. Millet in the Allier and the Auvergne’ (May 1988) dealt with Millet’s pure landscape work in the unfamiliar Vichy region of France, where Millet had gone for the sake of Madame Millet’s health. He contributed several articles on particular series of drawings by Millet and Daumier to Master Drawings. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to say that Coldstream and Euston Road appealed to the rational and objective side of Laughton’s mind, whereas Steer, Millet and Daumier reflected the romantic streak in his temperament. A late and unheralded interest in Giacometti (primarily as a painter and draughtsman) might suggest the romantic streak was in the ascendency after his retirement from university life. However, his only published work on the Italian (and I believe his last publication) was ‘Coldstream and Giacometti in London’ (British Art Journal, Spring 2009), which reconciled the two strands of his life’s work.

 

WENDY BARON