Hamish Miles
Art historian who built up the Barber Institute’s collection and was an expert on Sir David Wilkie
HAMISH MILES, who has died aged 91, was an art historian and a worldrenowned expert in the work of the Scottish artist, Sir David Wilkie; he also helped to develop, at the University of Birmingham, one of the most remarkable small galleries in the world.
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts had been founded in 1932 with an endowment by Lady Hattie Barber, and was the Courtauld’s chief provincial rival as a world-class collection of art housed by a university. In 1970 Miles became the university’s professor of Fine Arts and the institute’s third director. He held the post for 20 years.
Over that time he acquired some of its best-loved works, including the 18th-century masterpiece Countess Golovine by Vigée Le Brun, and he became the first director to acquire 20th-century paintings. Among them were Gwen John’s Mère Poussepin, René Magritte’s The Flavour of Tears and Léger’s Composition with Fruit.
It was also Miles who commissioned the artist Bernard Sindall to create one of the university’s best-known works of art – a life-size bronze figure of a woman, wearing nothing but a hat – as a gift to the university from Sir Robert and Lady Aitken, on Sir Robert’s retirement as the university’s vicechancellor. The sculpture now stands in front of the university’s clock tower.
But he found himself caught in the middle of a tussle between the university and the Barber Institute’s trustees as to what its role should be. The trustees, and Miles, were content to stick to Lady Barber’s vision of it as a place “for the encouragement of art and music” on the campus.
Although the art collection was always open to visitors, Miles saw it as his duty to lead the institute to even greater heights of academic and artistic excellence, not to spend his time singing its praises to those unaware of its treasures. The university, however, wanted the institute to extend its reach to the wider public, and to its leaders Miles, a taciturn scholar who had published little, did not seem the right person to do so.
Under pressure, he eventually retired early from the directorship. Such was his bitterness that he never went back to see the collection he had done so much to build up.
Hamish Miles was born at Stanton St John, Oxfordshire, on November 19 1925 to parents of Scottish ancestry. His father, James, was a journalist, author and literary editor; his grandfather, Alexander Miles, had been a renowned Edinburgh surgeon.
Educated at Douai School, in the final years of the war Miles served in the Army, first in the Black Watch then in the Parachute Regiment. He was in India training for a drop on Japaneseoccupied Singapore when Japan surrendered.
He resumed his education, first at Edinburgh University and then as a postgraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. He embarked on a Dphil on artists who had lived in Paris, but failed to qualify, possibly because he insisted on writing it in French, contrary to the university’s requirements that it should be either in English or Latin.
Fortunately for his academic career, universities at that time did not always insist that their teaching staff had doctorates. After a stint at the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, he moved to the new department of art history at the University of Glasgow, which was then responsible for the collection that has since become the Hunterian Art Gallery.
In 1966 he left Glasgow to found the University of Leicester’s department of art history. There, his interest in Sir David Wilkie was sparked by the artist’s intriguing picture of Washington Irving in the Archives of Seville in the collection of the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery.
Also at Leicester, Miles became a founding member of the Association of Art Historians. He served as an unpaid member of the Museums and Galleries Commission, for which he chaired a group of experts in a study of Scotland’s museums and galleries.
The Miles Report, as it became known, emphasised the educational role of such institutions and played an important role in drawing attention to a need for greater government support. For some 20 years Miles also served as a trustee of the National Galleries of Scotland.
Throughout his life, Miles enjoyed visiting auction sales. He was generous with his expertise if a dealer or auctioneer asked for his opinion; but occasionally, if they did not ask, he was able to buy pictures for himself which would have been unaffordable if they had been correctly attributed.
In 1959 he found George Henry’s River Landscape by Moonlight in a Glasgow sale, and bought it for £5. He recognised that it was a picture worthy of the Hunterian collection and offered it to them, despite having a mortgage, an overdraft and a young family. The offer was happily accepted; he got his fiver back.
A firm belief in right and wrong permeated Miles’s life. He was so appalled by the “Bloody Sunday” killings of unarmed demonstrators by British paratroopers in 1972 that he would have nothing to do with the Parachute Regiment of which he had once been so proud. A staunch Roman Catholic, he attended mass every Sunday until old age and infirmity made it impossible for him to do so.
Miles enjoyed holidays in his house in rural Perthshire, and after his retirement he moved to Edinburgh with his wife Jean, a classical scholar from America whom he had married in 1957.
Towards the end of his life, in 2014, he verified a work as one of David Wilkie’s that had been missing for 140 years; it is now in the National Gallery. Sadly he died before his exhaustive tome on Wilkie, written during his retirement, could be published.
Miles was appointed OBE in 1987 for services to art.
He is survived by his wife and by their two sons and two daughters.
Hamish Miles, born November 19 1925, died May 29 2017