Giles Waterfield
Brilliant and innovative director of Dulwich Picture Gallery who was also a prize-winning novelist
GILES WATERFIELD, who has died suddenly in Derbyshire from a heart attack, aged 67, accomplished vital rescue work as director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery from 1979 to 1996. Subsequently he became a freelance art expert, covering a multitude of subjects and filling an extraordinary number of roles as lecturer, adviser and administrator.
Exceptionally well-read, he was also a distinguished author, both as novelist and art historian. His novel The Long Afternoon (2000), a tragedy closely based on his grandparents’ life in a splendid villa in Menton, showed how a purposeless existence, for all its superficial attractions, risks sapping the will and turning aside the currents of action. Written in beautifully spare prose, it is a penetrating psychological study, which won the McKitterick prize.
Waterfield’s last book, The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain 1800-1914 (2015), was the fruit of a long-standing interest in the history of museums in the provinces. Indeed, the exhibition which he organised at the Royal Academy in 1998, “Art Treasures of England”, had resulted in regional museums being for the first time assisted by a national scheme of grant funding.
The People’s Galleries celebrated the zeal of those Victorian town councillors (sometimes mocked by snobbish art historians) who established so many grand and successful institutions beyond London, such as the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Birmingham City Art Gallery.
When Giles Waterfield, aged only 30 in 1979, took over as the first director of Sir John Soane’s great gallery in Dulwich, the institution was on its uppers; indeed it had reached the stage of being obliged to sell a picture in order to finance running expenses.
The new director soon proved himself to be not merely a fine scholar, but also a resourceful and innovative fundraiser. He developed the Friends’ organisation, as well as a scheme whereby donors could “adopt” an Old Master painting. Such ideas, then largely original, have since become staples of gallery finance.
Consistently fine exhibitions, such as “Leaving Portraits from Eton College” (1991), “Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain 1790 to 1990” (1991-92) and “Soane and Death” (1996), greatly increased public awareness of the gallery.
In 1994, moreover, Waterfield succeeded in removing responsibility for the institution from the Dulwich Estate, which had little finance to spare from its oversight of schools such as Dulwich College and Alleyn’s.
In its place there was established an independent body of trustees under the chairmanship of Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover. This achievement, which secured the future of the gallery, owed everything to Waterfield’s determination, resource, confidence and charm.
Somehow he was able to combine a steely will with a lightest of touches, and to achieve results as much through the affection he gave and inspired, as through any cracking of the whip.
Meanwhile in 1984 Waterfield had secured the services of Gillian Wolfe, who established an education department which succeeded brilliantly in creating links between the gallery and local schools. This was another initiative which would be widely copied throughout the country.
It was Waterfield’s fate, though not his fault, that a small Rembrandt portrait, of the painter’s friend Jacob de Gheyn III, was twice (in 1981 and 1983) stolen from the gallery during his directorship. Happily the picture was recovered on both occasions, albeit after three years in the case of the second theft.
Giles Adrian Waterfield was born at Bramley, Surrey, on July 24 1949, the second son and third child of Anthony and Honor Waterfield. Anthony Waterfield then worked for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and subsequently as scientific adviser to the British embassy in Paris.
Educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read English, Giles wrote copiously even as a teenager. His youthful output included five plays and a novel, all unpublished.
After Oxford, Waterfield studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he was deeply impressed by his tutor, Anthony Blunt. When Blunt was publicly outed as a spy in 1979, Waterfield remained conspicuously loyal, writing with Mark (now Sir Mark) Jones a letter to The Times, in which they declared: “For us, he remains a scholar and a gentleman.”
Waterfield’s first proper job, from 1976 to 1979, was as Education Officer, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton, an ideal preparation for his work at Dulwich. By the 1990s, however, he began to think that perhaps he was spending too much time on administration and fundraising, at the expense of his scholarly pursuits.
In 1995, even before leaving the Dulwich Gallery, he was appointed director of Royal Collection Studies. In this capacity he would organise a course in which he illustrated the history of the monarchy through visits to the royal palaces.
Those attending these sessions were themselves of the highest distinction and drawn from all over the world. One year, for instance, the group included the curator of the collections of the Queen of the Netherlands, the keeper at the Moscow Armoury, the director of Art at the Forbidden City in Beijing and the director of Tate Britain, as well as sundry American scholars.
As they all headed by bus to their destination, Giles Waterfield would take the microphone and deliver a flawless monologue on the palace in question. He spoke without notes, yet with entirely logical flow, keeping his audience mesmerised throughout the journey with his wit and erudition.
Such a star was in constant demand, whether as a lecturer at the Courtauld from 2002, or on such committees as the Museums Experts Panel (1996-2000), the Executive of the London Library (19972001), the Heritage Lottery Fund (2000-2006) and the National Trust’s Art Panel (2006-14).
Waterfield served as vice-president of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Studies (19982006); as chairman of the judges for both the Museum of the Year Awards (1999-2003) and the Art Book Prize (2008-14). He was also chairman of the Charleston Trust (2006-10), and a trustee of the Holborne Museum in Bath (1999-2003) and of the Garden Museum in Lambeth (from 2012).
Besides writing regular reviews, Waterfield somehow found time to fulfil his early ambition to become a novelist. The Long Afternoon was followed by The Hound in the Left-hand Corner (2002), a sparkling satire on the museum world which also served the serious purpose of revealing the shabby compromises necessitated by dwindling government grants.
Markham Thorpe (2006), set in the 19th century, centred on one of Waterfield’s long-standing interests, the life of domestic servants. In 2003 he had curated “Below Stairs”, a revelatory exhibition of servants’ portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.
His fourth novel, The Iron Necklace (2015), followed the challenges encountered by an English girl who married into a German family just before the First World War. There was also an interesting sub-plot, not without relevance to the author’s own life, of the heroine’s brother coming to terms with his homosexuality.
Notwithstanding Waterfield’s extraordinary industry, he never seemed to outsiders to be under overwhelming pressure. Evidently he wrote with the same facility as he lectured.
He loved to give dinner parties, whether at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, or later at his house near the Oval. Cooking was another of his talents, carried out with the same relaxed skill which he brought to every challenge.
He had a vast range of friends, by no means all of them art experts, with women very much to the fore. Last summer he demonstrated another talent, when he acted as master of ceremonies at a godson’s wedding, riveting every guest with his wit, humanity and insight.
In particular he loved children, who considered his sometimes risqué humour quite the funniest they had ever heard from a proper grown-up.
Giles Waterfield was appointed a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1991, and of the Royal Historical Society in 2013. Inexplicably, however, he never received any national honour.