Lawrence Gowing

English · 1918 to 1991

Born Lawrence Burnett Gowing on 21 April 1918 in Stoke Newington, in London's East End, he grew up in a Quaker family and was educated at two Quaker schools, the Downs School and Leighton Park, a background that later made him a conscientious objector when the Second World War came. He never formally studied art history, learning instead as a protege of the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell, while training as a painter under William Coldstream and Maurice Feild at the Euston Road School from 1936 to 1938, alongside fellow students Quentin Bell and Adrian Stokes. Through the 1940s he built a reputation as a portrait and landscape painter in the sober, closely observed Euston Road manner, painting sitters that included Clement Attlee and the historian Veronica Wedgwood. Around 1950 tuberculosis forced him into a long convalescence, and it was in that enforced stillness that he wrote his first book, a slim, intensely personal study of Vermeer published by Faber in 1952 that read the Dutch painter's canvases the way one painter reads another's. The book made his name as a critic, and he went on to write further studies of Hogarth, Turner, Cezanne, and Matisse, and later of his friend Lucian Freud. He taught and led art schools for the rest of his life, as Professor of Fine Art at Durham, head of Chelsea School of Art, Keeper of British Art at the Tate, Professor at Leeds, and finally Principal of the Slade School from 1975 to 1985, curating major loan exhibitions of Turner, Matisse, and Cezanne along the way. He married the writer Julia Strachey in 1952, and after that marriage ended, Jenny Wallis in 1967, with whom he had three daughters. Knighted in 1982, he died of heart failure in London on 5 February 1991, at seventy two.