David Scrase
Revered curator specialising in old master drawings who was a much-loved Cambridge character
DAVID SCRASE, who has died after a fall aged 71, was one of what may prove to be a dying breed of museum curators, whose knowledge of and devotion to the collections in their charge is the guiding principle of their professional lives.
David Ellison Scrase was born in Croydon on March 15 1949. His early life was far from easy, with childhood polio and an absent father to overcome, but his years at school at Westminster were very happy ones, and he, his twin brother John, who predeceased him, and his mother Kathy formed an exceptionally close-knit trio.
In those early days David’s passionate love of the arts was already apparent, but was not particularly directed towards the visual sphere. Instead, he was an almost obsessive balletomane, and over time became close to Dame Margot Fonteyn; he was in effect the ghostwriter of her autobiography, published in 1975.
At Pembroke College, Oxford, Scrase read Chinese, subsequently studied on the Sotheby’s Works of Art Course, and was briefly in the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, whose then director, Sir John PopeHennessy, described him as a “preternatural genius”.
In 1976 Scrase joined the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge as Assistant Keeper of Paintings and Drawings. He was never to leave, becoming Keeper of a merged department of Paintings, Drawings and Prints in 1985, and ultimately Assistant Director of Collections from 2003 until he retired in 2013. He was also Acting Director of the museum during an interregnum shortly before his retirement.
At the time of his appointment, Scrase’s paper qualifications were slight, but the Fitzwilliam’s then director, the formidable Michael Jaffé, had the vision – and courage of his convictions – needed to recognise the qualities that would make Scrase such a force to be reckoned with in his chosen career.
This was above all a result of the fact that he combined deep knowledge in his main area of expertise, old master drawings, with real breadth of curiosity, impeccable taste, and that least definable of gifts – a good eye.
Interestingly, Jaffé was by no means the only senior figure among Scrase’s admirers, with Philip Pouncey, the doyen in the field of Italian old master drawings, being another. Indeed, one of the most inspired exhibitions Scrase organised (together with Julien Stock) was The Achievement of a Connoisseur: Philip Pouncey – Italian old master Drawings (1985), which involved a display of 62 sheets first correctly attributed by Pouncey.
By the same token, as Scrase himself became a species of – distinctly ageless – elder statesman, he attracted immense respect and genuine affection from younger generations of drawings experts.
His flair and judgment, allied to a deep-seated collecting instinct, above all applied to enhancing the Fitzwilliam’s holdings, bore fruit in all manner of acquisitions over the years: one of the most notable of them all – in 2003 – was a superlative and highly resolved first idea for Federico Barocci’s altarpiece of The Institution of the Eucharist in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.
In its turn, the addition of the sheet in question led in 2006 to Scrase’s exhibition A Touch of the Divine: Drawings by Federico Barocci in British Collections, which was accompanied by an elegant and authoritative catalogue.
On the scholarly front, Scrase always gleefully denied that he was a “real” art historian, but proved himself to be a true scholar, above all by virtue of his magisterial 863-page Italian Drawings at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge of 2011.
It is a mark of its author’s intellectual curiosity that he did not shy away from taking on drawings ranging in date from Pisanello in the 15th century to Sandro Chia in the 20th, and for good measure added in the Spanish school.
The same enviable range is revealed in such other publications as his exhibition catalogues, Drawings and Watercolours by Peter de Wint (1979) and Flowers of Three Centuries: One Hundred Drawings from the Broughton Collection (1983-84), and the successor to that volume in the Fitzwilliam Museum Handbooks series, Flower Drawings (1997).
Scrase was never what has been described as an automatic writer, but – whether in the form of learned articles or exhibition and book reviews – his insights were invariably well worth waiting for.
He was a great Cambridge character, revered by colleagues within the Fitzwilliam and adored by its Friends and the patrons known as the Marlay Group, not least for his brilliance as a guide both at home and abroad. At the same time, he was a familiar and much-loved presence in the life of the city far beyond the world of the museum.
He was possessed of a dangerously sharp wit, but also of an exceptionally warm heart. Gifts to friends, but also to institutions, often in honour of friends, were one of his specialities.
David Scrase’s partner, the distinguished architect Rick Mather (1937-2013), a number of whose major achievements were museum projects, brought him great happiness in the latter part of his life.
David Scrase, born March 15 1949, died October 31 2020