Obituary – Alastair Laing
Alastair Laing (1944-2024)
Alastair Laing, the widely respected expert on the work of François Boucher, as well as an astounding array of other subjects, passed away on June 29, 2024, just shy of his 80th birthday, leaving his wife, Hana and their son Sam. He is also grieved by countless friends and colleagues with whom he most generously shared his thoughts and expertise, not to mention his good humor. He was one of the last great letter writers (despite giving in to email in recent years). Many readers of this journal would recognize from across the room his distinctive handwriting in blue ink, on National Trust letterhead, the lines of text often forced to curve and continue up and around the margins as his thoughts overflowed the limits of the sheet.
As with many talented British curators and art historians, Alastair got his start in the trade. After reading history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he went on to study with Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He left unfinished a thesis on South-German Rococo stucco but did treat the subject more expansively when he co-authored Baroque and Rococo: Architecture and Decoration with Blunt in 1978. He joined the Heim Gallery on Jermyn Street in 1976 where he “really learnt [the] profession,” according to an interview published on the CODART website in 2013.
His career took a decisive turn in 1983 when—in Alastair’s own words—he was “plucked” from Heim by Pierre Rosenberg to collaborate, along with Patrice Marandel, on the great Boucher exhibition held in New York, Detroit, and Paris in 1986-87. As Philippe de Montebello aptly noted at the close of that show, “sometimes a great scholar makes an exhibition and sometimes an exhibition makes a great scholar.”
In Britain, Alastair is best known for his years at the National Trust where he was Curator of Pictures and Sculptures from 1986 to 2013. It was an unfathomably vast job, looking after over 120 historic buildings and their collections. His work was shared with the public in the form of an exhibition In Trust for the Nation: Paintings from National Trust Houses, held at the National Gallery, London in 1995-96. A more specialized two volume catalogue, Drawings for architecture, design and ornament from the series, the James A. de Rothschild bequest at Waddesdon Manor, appeared in 2006.
As part of his service to the field and to the nation, he sat on the Reviewing Committee for the Export of Works of Art (1996-2002) and the Acceptance in Lieu Panel (1994-2005). He was made a trustee of the National Art Collections Fund in 2013. He served as Trustee and Director of The Burlington Magazine and was made Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988.
Not to be overlooked among his many publications are his reviews of books and exhibitions. He wrote them throughout his career, and they invariably made significant contributions to the art historical literature. They were never unkind, but always candid. He saw exhibitions as “particularly useful in sorting the wheat from the chaff: attributions that must have seemed entirely reasonable when made in isolation, wither away when confronted with the touchstone of the genuine article.” (Burlington Magazine, November 1992, p. 249). They are also a pleasure to read; one hears his voice in the words on the page.
All the while, and despite the unrelenting emergence of new drawings, his work on Boucher continued apace. In four decades, his knowledge grew ever greater, but his curiosity never gave way to rigidity. At his death, he was still at work on his most ambitious undertaking, a catalogue raisonné of Boucher’s drawings. It is hoped that the means will be found to allow his collaborator Laure-Aline Demazure to bring the catalogue to completion. It now falls to the next generation to carry on Laing’s work.
Perrin Stein, Metropolitan Museum of Art
