Sulgrave Manor
Manor Road
Sulgrave
Nr. Banbury
Oxfordshire
OX17 2SD
United Kingdom
+44 (0)1295 760205
Charity No. 1003839 |
The
2007 Watson Chair Lecture
In 2007 the lecture, entitled "The artist as critic: Whistler, Sargent and Henry James" was given by Duncan Robinson, Master of Clare College and Director of The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Duncan Robinson |
A 59-year old northerner, Mr Robinson was educated
at King Edward VI School Macclesfield and at Clare College,
where he read English. He is one of the leading authorities
on 20th century British painting -- a revised version
of his influential study of Stanley Spencer, first published
in 1979, is still in print.
His training in art history began with a Mellon Fellowship
at Yale in 1965, and his academic career ever since
has straddled the Atlantic and been divided between
Cambridge and Yale. On completion of his Yale MA in
1967 he returned to Cambridge for graduate study on
the Sienese Trecento painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti under
the supervision of Sir John Pope-Hennessy. He was appointed
Assistant Keeper of Paintings and Drawings at the Fitzwilliam
in 1970, and Keeper in 1976.
In 1981 he returned to New Haven as Director of the
Yale Center for British Art, and simultaneously as Chief
Executive Officer of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies
in British Art in London. Though these responsibilities
inevitably focused his research on British 20th-century
painters, Duncan Robinson retains a passion for Italian
Trecento and Quattrocento art, and has wide interests
in other periods: his future research plans include
a study of painting in the age of Joshua Reynolds.
He taught the History of Art at Yale until 1995, when
he returned to Cambridge as Director of the Fitzwilliam
Museum, and was elected a Professorial Fellow of Clare
College. He is also a Trustee of Yale University Press,
a member of the Court of the Royal College of Art, and
a Director or Council Member of a host of artistic and
learned institutions, from Kettle's Yard and the William
Blake Trust to the Stanley Spencer Gallery at Cookham.
Mr Robinson's term as Director at the Fitzwilliam has
been characterised by two main concerns: to rouse the
University to a more active sense of the treasure it
possesses in the Museum as a teaching and research resource,
and to provide desperately needed extra space to meet
the changing needs of a great modern museum. The multi-million
pound extension sensitively integrated into the Courtyard
area of the Fitzwilliam houses a shop and restaurant,
seminar and lecture facilities, a meeting area, a new
Ceramics Study centre, and a fine gallery for temporary
exhibitions.
A genial and clubbable man, Duncan Robinson is a keen
and gifted teacher -- in 1994 he was one of just six
Yale professors invited by the Association of Yale Alumni
to contribute six video-taped lectures to the Yale Great
Teachers series. He has never allowed his many administrative
responsibilities to eliminate his contact with undergraduate
and graduate students and, despite his demanding work
at the Fitzwilliam, is a much-valued teacher in the
Department of Architecture and History of Art.
Duncan Robinson has been married since 1967: his wife,
Elizabeth, hails from Fairfield, Connecticut. Trained
as a paper conservator, she is a painter and interior
designer, and a skilled gardener. They have three children.
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The Watson Chair
Symbolising Anglo-American friendship
The Watson Chair and Sulgrave Manor
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