Obituaries of Terence William Ivan Hodgkinson, CBE

In the course of his career Terence Hodgkinson was actively associated with many of the key institutions in the British museum and art world, playing a significant role in their wellbeing and development.

After graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, Terence William Ivan Hodgkinson worked as a volunteer at the Warburg Institute where he assisted Rudolf Wittkower with translations from the German. Joining the Army in 1939, he was promoted to major on the General Staff in 1943. After demobilization he joined the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1946 as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture and, only two years later, was appointed Assistant to the Director.

This was a crucial time for the museum. It had been virtually emptied of its collections during the war years and the innovative new director, Leigh Ashton, seized the opportunity for a radical restructuring of its displays. Hodgkinson was his indispensable right-hand man in this, acquiring skills of dealing with architects, craftsmen, museum staff and Whitehall, that were to serve him in good stead in his later career. In the later years of his directorship Sir Leigh went into serious decline and Hodgkinson became director in all but name, a situation he handled with exceptional tact. It was in recognition of this signal service that he was to be appointed CBE in 1958.

After Ashton's early retirement in 1955, Hodgkinson became assistant to the new director, Trenchard Cox, continuing in that capacity until 1962, when he returned full-time to the Sculpture Department as Deputy Keeper, although retaining his position as secretary to the advisory council. Sir Trenchard's directorship is looked back upon by those who experienced it as one of the happiest and most productive periods in the museum's history and Hodgkinson contributed in no small measure to this.

After Sir Trenchard's retirement in 1966 Hodgkinson succeeded John Pope-Hennessy (who became the new director) as keeper of the Department of Architecture and Sculpture. His was to be a harmonious and productive keepership, giving rise to a flow of valuable publications by himself and his colleagues in the department, whose researches he actively fostered and many notably imaginative acquisitions.

On Pope-Hennessy's resignation in 1973 Hodgkinson was the staff's favourite to become the next director, but was unsuccessful. His retirement came up in 1974 when he was offered the directorship of the Wallace Collection. There, both the building and its collections were in urgent need of attention and Hodgkinson embarked on a vigorous programme of renovation, involving the installation of air-conditioning, new lighting systems, the provision of modern storage facilities and major campaigns of picture cleaning and reframing and the restoration of deteriorating furniture.

The financing of all this required skilful dealings with Whitehall at a time of imminent cuts. Fortunately, he was well armed by his experience at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Such a comprehensive programme was impossible to bring to fruition before he was obliged to retired at the aged of 65 in 1978, but by then he had already laid the foundations on which his successor, John Ingamells, was able to complete the work in 1982.

Hardly had Hodgkinson retired than there occurred the untimely death of Benedict Nicolson, Editor of 'The Burlington Magazine' and he was persuaded to take his place there. Here, as at the Wallace Collection, there was much to done urgently. There had for some time been fears for the survival of the magazine, but Hodgkinson was determined to keep it coming out and, against formidable odds, he succeeded. It is no exaggeration to say that he saved the magazine and he was able to hand it over in 1987 resuscitated to his successor Neil Macgregor, under whose editorship its future was eventually guaranteed by a trust.

He continued to serve on the editorial board, much involved in the plans to secure the future of the magazine, becoming himself a trustee in 1986. Now at last formally retired, he immediately accepted an invitation to serve on the Standing Commission on Museums and Galleries which he did until 1988, and undertook to supervise postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Since 1975 he had been a member of the executive committee of the national Art Collections Fund and he remained on it until 1988.

A special issue of 'The Burlington Magazine' produced in July 1982 in Hodgkinson's honour (the only multilingual issue of the magazine ever published), bore witness to his prestige as a scholar and to the extent of his friendships in international art historical circles. As for his own studies, his special area of interest was French and English sculpture of the 18th century and it is a matter for regret that he published less than he might have, given different circumstances. His appointment as Assistant to the Director so soon after joining the Victoria and Albert Museum left him less time to pursue his own studies than his contemporaries enjoyed and came at that crucial stage when most curators are laying the foundations of their scholarly careers.

Once free of that post, he began to publish quite regularly and what he published was exemplary. His cataloguing of the French and British soul sculpture in the Frick Collection, 1970 and of the sculpture at Waddesdon Manor which appeared in the same year, were meticulously researched and illuminating and his articles for 'The Burlington Magazine', the 'Victoria and Albert Museum Bulleting and Yearbook' and the Walpole Society were models of penetration, lucidity and concision.

He had long nourished the intention that, after his retirement from the Victoria and Albert Museum, he would write a monograph on the sculptor Roubiliac, but the onerous tasks he then took on ruled this out of the question. The fruits of much of his best researches are in the files of the Sculpture Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum where, characteristically, he left them for the use of his successors. As a curator, he made many well-chosen acquisitions, greatly widening the scope of the museum's sculpture collections.

A generous man, modest and wholly unselfish, solicitous for the welfare of his colleagues and junior staff, always ready to advise and help, and with an engaging wit, he could not but make enduring friendships wherever he worked or served. As in his later career he moved from one responsibility to another, he maintained a keen interest in the fortunes of those institutions in which he had previously worked and of their staff. He was driven not only by a deep love of the visual arts, but by a passionate belief in the value of institutions and the necessity to do everything possible for their survival.

Terence Hodgkinson did not marry.

Reproduced with kind permission of The Times
© Times Newspapers Limited

From The Daily Telegraph, 22 October 1999

Museum director who set the Wallace Collection on course to become one of Europe's best museums

Terence Hodgkinson, who has died aged 85, became Director the Wallace Collection after two decades at the Victoria and Albert Museum; he was then editor of 'The Burlington Magazine' from 1978 to 1981.

Some had hoped he would become director of the V&A in 1974, in succession to Sir John Pope-Hennessy; but in the event his impact in the museums and art world was perhaps greater as an 'eminence grise'. In any case Hodgkinson preferred to keep out of the limelight.

A scrupulous scholar and a principled public servant, he recognized and encouraged ability. He was admired by colleagues of all ages and in later years was visited at home by a stream of scholars and museum curators in search of solace and advice.

Terence William Ivan Hodgkinson, an only child, was born on October 7, 1913. His mother, Kathryn Van Vleck Townsend, was an American, the daughter of the Vicar of All Angels, Manhattan. After his parents' divorce, Terence was brought up by his paternal grandmother.

From Oundle he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford. Handsome, charming and buoyed-up by a private income from the family paper mill in Somerset, Hodgkinson then headed for London where he moved in the musical and artistic circles of the mid-1930s.

An interest in architecture and fluent command of German drew him to the Warburg Institute, then staffed by the émigré art historians who had come with the Institute to London when it was moved from Hamburg in 1933. While helping Rudolf Wittkower and others to put their writings into good English, Hodgkinson developed the critical art historical faculties that he would later apply.

After the war, during which he served at Bletchley Park and a major on the General Staff, he joined the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the V&A. After two years, in 1948 he was appointed Assistant to the Director, Sir Leigh Ashton.

Although gifted, Ashton was a troubled man who drank. His behaviour became ever more erratic and while Hodgkinson did his best to fend off disaster, by the time in 1955 when Ashton retired early, morale at the museum was low.

Hodgkinson recalled his sense of relief when Ashton's entirely amiable successor, Trenchard Cox, arrived. Hodgkinson stood on the steps to welcome Cox and had soon become one of his most devoted admirers. He helped Cox to learn the names of all the museum's several hundred staff within three weeks - so effectively that Cox only slipped up once, when accidentally confusing the identity of two typists who had temporarily changed places.

Hodgkinson continued to work very happily as Cox's assistant until 1962 and also served as secretary to the museum's Advisory Council from 1951 to 1967. In recognition of these services, he was appointed CBE in 1958. Throughout this period, Hodgkinson kept up his scholarly interests, believing it to be essential for a museum administrator to do so. His articles on Christopher Hewetson, Daniel Le Marchand and Lambert Sigisbert Adam, published in 'The Burlington Magazine' and elsewhere, remain essential points of reference.

When he returned to the Department of Architecture and Sculpture in 1962, his contemporary, John Pope-Hennessy, was Keeper. Working at close quarters with so domineering a personality as 'The Pope' cannot have been easy, but Hodgkinson was always generous when speaking of him.

When Pope-Hennessy succeeded Cox as the museum's Director in 1967, Hodgkinson replaced him as Keeper. Whereas Pope-Hennessy's interest was centred on Italian Renaissance sculpture, Hodgkinson carried a torch for the sculptors of the 18th century and it was in this field that he enriched the V&A's collections, notably with masterpieces by Roubiliac and Houdon.

His encyclopaedic knowledge and his mastery of the discipline of cataloguing brought invitations to catalogue the later sculpture in the Frick Collection in New York and the collection at Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury. His catalogues, both published in 1970 are models of their kind.

By the time Pope-Hennessy left the V&A to become Director of the British Museum in 1974, Hodgkinson was already 60. But he was then offered the directorship of the Wallace Collection, with its magnificent 18th century holdings.

Hodgkinson might have rested on his laurels, but instead, with only four years in hand, he set about a thorough programme of reform, recognizing that the Wallace Collection was one of the nation's most valuable and neglected cultural resources.

There can be no greater tribute to his skills of persuasion at all levels than his success in finding the money for a complete refurbishment of the building at a time of public funding shortages.

With his exemplary campaign in that most sensitive of areas, the cleaning and restoring of the pictures and with the judicious appointment of junior staff, among them the present Director. Hodgkinson set the Wallace on a course it deserved. It is now among the best catalogued and best presented museums in Europe.

Hodgkinson retired from the directorship of the Wallace Collection in 1978, whereupon, with the unexpected death of Benedict Nicolson after 31 years as editor of 'The Burlington Magazine', he was asked to step into the breach.

Hodgkinson aimed to consolidate what was good and to identify a successor worthy to continue its tradition of independent scholarship in an increasingly commercial market. This he did, handing over the editorship in 1981 to Neil MacGregor, now the Director of the National Gallery.

Hodgkinson served on the executive committee of the National Art Collections Fund (1975-88) and on the Museums and Galleries Commission (1981-88).

Known to Highgate neighbours as 'The Major', he could appear the very picture of the austere English gentleman-scholar, but the hostess who described him as 'the man with American manners' hit upon an important part of his make-up.

While he stuck to the conventional 'unmarried' in his 'Who's Who' entry, Hodgkinson spent 50 years with Hans Schneider, the flamboyant Viennese designer. Their beautiful house in The Grove, with its views over Hampstead Heath, was often full of sociable composers, novelists and industrialists.

Hodgkinson was already frail when Schneider died in 1995. He never recovered fully from the loss.

Reproduced with kind permission of The Telegraph
©  The Telegraph

From The Independent, 13 October 1999

Terence Hodgkinson was in the very best sense of the term an exemplary museum official. But although he would probably have found even such a modest description excessive, this gives little hint of the qualities and achievements of someone who played a key but quiet role in the development of museums and public art collections in Britain from the late 1940s until the 1980s.

A self-effacing man of great generosity, integrity and acuity of mind, Hodgkinson was in his various roles trusted and admired by colleagues who knew they could rely on advice that would be given with thought, care and honesty. Though he would have (quite wrongly) denied being a scholar himself, he had an unrivalled knowledge of sculpture, especially of the 18th century and the acknowledgement pages of numerous publications by scholars in Britain and abroad show what was owed to his encouragements, guidance and information, all generously offered without any fuss. His achievement lies not just in what he did but as much in what he enabled others to do.

Born in 1913 and brought up by his grandmother in Somerset, Terence Hodgkinson read PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford and with his interest in art history already kindled, he went on to catalogue the prints in the Pepysian Library at Cambridge, spending some of this period working in the Fitzwilliam Museum as well as helping Rudolf Wittkower with translations from the German in the newly arrived Warburg Institute.

At the outbreak of the Second World War he was called up and soon transferred to military intelligence. By this date he had already met Hans Schneider, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, who was to remain his partner for over 50 years - a partnership in which Hodgkinson's English restraint was well matched by Schneider's Central European ebullience.

At the end of the war he became an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where his first task was to organize the display of the vast collection of English medieval alabasters recently given by one of the museum's leading donors, Dr W L Hildburgh. It was on this somewhat unlikely subject that he wrote his first article.

Within a short time his administrative and organizational abilities were recognised and he was made Assistant to the Director, Leigh Ashton, at a time when the collection was being returned to the museum from wartime storage in Wales. With great boldness of vision, Ashton had taken this opportunity to re-order the V&A into a new system of Primary and Study galleries but, as he became steadily more debilitated by his alcoholism, Hodgkinson was largely responsible for realizing a scheme that led to the V&A's being so admired in the post-war period.

By the early 1950s he was effectively running the museum. Though extremely able as an administrator, he was successful but not least became he worked so well with staff at all levels; in an institutional culture where patrician hauteur was the norm among curators, he genuinely liked his colleagues and they liked him.

While this period allowed him to develop what would today be described as management skills, as well as an aptitude for well-judged and effective displays, his principal enthusiasm continued to be for sculpture. Returning to the department, he took on responsibility for post-medieval English sculpture - a subject that only begun to be studied seriously in the 1930s - and with characteristic discrimination, began to acquire a series of outstanding works, culminating in the purchase of Roubiliac's statue of Handel.

One of the strengths he brought to this area was an ability to link English sculpture with continental traditions, above all French, where his knowledge was unrivalled in this country and much respected by colleagues in France. Though his proposals were often thwarted by John Pope-Hennessy (as Keeper and later Director), with whom he had a difficult relationship throughout his career at the V&A, he succeeded in buying superb pieces by Houdon, Pigalle and Pajou, the last being one of the most impressive portrait busts shown in the Pajou exhibition in Paris and New York last year.

In enabling the museum to make its most significant acquisitions of French sculpture since the Jones Bequest in 1882, Hodgkinson was using not only a keen visual sense based on sustained scrutiny of French sculpture in collections thought Europe and North American, but also a remarkable familiarity with 18th century sale catalogues and other documentary sources. It was his combination of meticulous scholarship and connoisseurial flair that led to the museum's acquisition of two spectacular marble groups which he recognized as two of the lost sculptures carved by Antonio Corradini for the gardens in Dresden. For many years he retained an 1848 English sale catalogue identifying other figures in the hope that they would reappear unrecognized on the London art market.

Writing did not come easily to him, although a reader would not have realized this from a range of publications written with great cogency and clarity and in a prose style that was elegant as his appearance and as immaculate as his manner. The articles he wrote on sculptors such as Christopher Hewetson and Joseph Wilton - a particularly favourite because of his French qualities - were for the most part modest in scale, but in their thoroughness of documentation and cogency of argument they set a new standard for writing about English sculpture. The same rigour was apparent in his catalogues of sculpture in the Frick and Waddesdon collections where his economically brief entries rest on, but scarcely reveal, much original research involving the judicious weighing of evidence.

The clearest register of his qualities as a scholar lies in the meticulous notes he wrote in his distinctive angular hand on the catalogue cards in the Sculpture department. As well as being a model of clarity, these are informed throughout by a touch skepticism that made him disinclined to what he would have regarded as unjustified speculation. While he would make a careful note of another scholar's publication in this vein, he would add simply 'No new information'.

Despite his distaste for scholarly sloppiness, Hodgkinson was far from unsympathetic to other art historical approaches and nobody could have been more encouraging to younger art historians. He made the collection and his own knowledge accessible to numerous foreign scholars and prompted his colleagues to explore areas which they were to make their own. It was, for example, Hodgkinson who suggested to Michael Baxandall that he should work on German wood sculpture and so write his 'The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany' (1980), one of the most important works in art history produced during the past 25 years.

On Pope-Hennessy's departure for the British Museum in 1974, many V&A staff hoped that Hodgkinson would succeed him. This did not happen and instead he embarked upon a 'retirement' that involved reorganizing several institutions that greatly benefited from his remarkable combination of abilities. The first was the Wallace Collection which, through his refurbishment programme and improvement of staff morale as well as his French expertise, he made into a modern museum.

Then, after the unexpected death of Benedict Nicolson, the took on the editorship of 'The Burlington Magazine'. Here he applied not only his precision and acuteness as a scholar, but also his practical sense by setting the magazine on a firm financial footing. Then followed a period on the Museums and Galleries Commission. His judgment and knowledge were in constant demand, both on appointment committees and bodies such as the National Art Collections Fund, the Walpole Society and the Samuel Courtauld Trust.

In these roles, as in his many acts of personal kindness and generosity, he acted with integrity and without fuss. Terence Hodgkinson was held in great affection by all who worked with him. A man with standards and a sense of fun, he had a notable but unostentatious public life.

Terence William Ivan Hodgkinson, art historian and museum director; born 7 October 1913; Assistant Keeper, Department of Architecture and Sculpture, Victoria and Albert Museum 1946-67, Keeper 1967-74, Assistant to the Director 1948-62, Secretary to the Advisory Council 1951-67; CBE 1958; Director, Wallace Collection 1974-78; Editor, Burlington Magazine 1978-81; died London, 4 October 1999.

Reproduced with kind permission of Malcolm Baker and The Independent
© The Independent