j. a. gere, a tribute

J. A. Gere, a TributeAuthor(s): Nicholas TurnerSource: Master Drawings, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 219-222Published by: Master Drawings AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1554231 .

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Portrait ofJohn Gere by C. Bathurst

J. A. Gere, a Tribute

Nicholas Turner

John Gere, who died on II January I995 aged 73, was the last in an outstanding line of English specialists of Italian old master drawings that included A. E. Popham (d. 1971), James Byam Shaw (d. 1992), Sir Karl Parker

(d. 1992), and Philip Pouncey (d. I990). Gere's work-

ing life was spent in the Department of Prints and

Drawings of the British Museum, which he served with distinction and where he was Keeper from 1973 to

I98I. Best known as an authority on sixteenth-century Italian drawings, he had an impressive knowledge of all the major European schools, and was as familiar with

aspects of English and French art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as with the drawings of Raphael and his circle. He had a special affection for the Pre-

Raphaelite movement in England, and two books on

the subject neatly frame his remarkable sequence of art- historical writings. The first, written with Robin Iron-

side, was published in I948, and the second, the

catalogue to the British Museum's exhibition of Pre-

Raphaelite drawings, in I994; the exhibition it accom-

panied was still showing when he died. He was born on 7 October I92I, the son of Arnold

Gere and Carol Giles, and was educated at Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford. He inherited artistic lean-

ings from both parents; his half-uncle on his father's side was the Birmingham School painter Charles March

Gere, while his mother's sister Catherina Giles was a Vorticist who had worked in the circle of Wyndham Lewis. On 25 March 1946, John Gere joined the De-

partment of Prints and Drawings as an assistant keeper,

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cutting short a course of study in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art to do so. According to his

departmental Day Book, the first week in his new job was spent classifying "part of five portfolios of drawings by Stothard, and an album of drawings by Charles Rick- etts and Charles Shannon," which he did under the su-

pervision of the then Keeper, A. E. Popham. Within a matter of weeks, he had been put to work on the Ital- ian drawings alongside Philip Pouncey, who had trans- ferred to the Department from the National Gallery in the previous year. Pouncey was working with Popham on the preparation of the catalogue of fourteenth- and

fifteenth-century Italian drawings in the Department, a

project for which Gere was himself later co-opted in order to see the work through the press. This task he

fondly remembered "as perhaps the most valuable part of his entire education."

Gere's previous assignment in Italian drawings, and the one that had earned him Popham's confidence, was the translation from the German of Johannes Wilde's then recently completed catalogue of the drawings by Michelangelo, an undertaking made all the more ardu- ous by Wilde's conviction that the subtlety of his con- clusions would be wasted on the English, whom he believed to be ignorant of art history. Gere was in the habit of re-enacting this complaint, in imitation broken

English, with much regretful nodding of the head. The excellence of Wilde's catalogue is in no small part due to Gere's lucid translation.

Of an entirely different order was Gere's subsequent collaboration with Pouncey, a partnership that resulted in one of the most important and creative episodes in the recent study of Italian old masters. Together they wrote the catalogue of drawings by Raphael and his circle in the British Museum, published in 1962, and the

catalogue of drawings by artists active in Rome from ca.

1550 to ca. 1640, published in I983. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, these two works have set a standard for the publication of museum catalogues on

drawings. In a number of recent tributes to the mem-

ory of his late colleague and friend, Gere wrote amus-

ingly of what now seems a golden period in the history of the Department, when the principal task of the cu- ratorial staff was not "administration" (a word to which Gere would give ironic emphasis), but the study of the

drawings. Given the many years of collaboration between the two men, their work together not surpris- ingly took on an aspect of ritual; the office door would be firmly shut, and periods of writing would be inter-

spersed by sessions of intense discussion, in which even the finest points of prose received careful scrutiny.

Gere's monograph Taddeo Zuccaro. His Development Studied in his Drawings, published in 1969, was another

major contribution to the study of Italian drawings. Its

purpose was to establish Taddeo's personality as a drafts-

man, as distinct from that of his less talented but longer- lived younger brother Federico, with whom Taddeo is still sometimes confused. Touchingly dedicated to

Popham and Pouncey ("AEP ET PMRP / COLLEGIS

EXEMPLARIBVS"), the book is characteristically well

organized and written. As in so many of Gere's other

writings, strategically placed witticisms entertain the reader. Reflecting on the text of Taddeo's epitaph, Gere was much taken by the comparison that Federico had there invoked between Taddeo and Raphael: both were natives of Urbino and each died when he had just reached the age of thirty-seven. The analogy prompted Gere to one of his typical asides, a jibe intended to take the wind from Federico's sails: "Though it cannot in it- self be any bar to posthumous fame to be cut off at the same age as Raphael, Taddeo had the additional mis- fortune to be survived for nearly half a century by a namesake and faithful imitator who reduced his style to a series of stock formulas."

Gere maintained his interest in the Zuccari to the end and was putting the finishing touches on the Sup- plement to his 1969 catalogue when he died. Although a certain dislike for Federico persisted, he came to be- lieve that he had limited too severely the number of

drawings attributable to Taddeo, with the result that Federico's share could now be slightly diminished. This number of Master Drawings, which contains the list of

drawings by Taddeo that have come to light since the

I969 catalogue together with a number of updated opinions on drawings previously considered, has now become a special issue in his memory.

He contributed numerous articles and reviews to learned journals, including many to this one and to the

Burlington Magazine. (For a complete list of his publica- tions, see the bibliography, published in conjunction

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with an appreciation by Christopher White, in the

forthcoming issue of Proceedings of the British Academy.) Their subjects ranged from the drawings of such im-

portant sixteenth-century Italian artists as Correggio, Perino del Vaga, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and Pirro

Ligorio to relatively minor figures such as Niccolo Trometta (whose activity as a draftsman Gere was the first to reconstruct) and Matteo Perez da Lecce. His book reviews were likewise models of their kind,

though they were sometimes severe when he felt this was justified. In a generally positive critique of the late Sir Karl Parker's 1956 catalogue of the Italian drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, his censure of the

compiler for not including indexes caused a serious rift. In recent years, he became much practiced in the writ-

ing of obituaries, at which he was similarly highly ac-

complished, but about which he was wont to complain. Among the last he wrote were those for James Byam Shaw and Parker, both of which appeared in Master

Drawings in I993.

Although he railed against the "fully trained art historian" and insisted that he was a public servant rather than a museum official, Gere, like Pouncey, was himself a profoundly influential English art historian and museum curator. As Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, he was first rate and carried out his official duties scrupulously. This aspect of his career was

relatively little known, except to a small circle of friends and former colleagues. An instance of his attention to detail is his unsurpassed writing of the register, the de-

partmental record of acquisitions. He organized many successful exhibitions, at the British Museum and else-

where, including Drawings by Michelangelo in 1975, by far and away the most popular exhibition staged by the

Department of Prints and Drawings in the recent past. Although guarded about what he once described as "the common enemy, the public," he was in fact con-

stantly attentive to its needs, as instanced by his insistence on the very highest standards in the writing of exhibition labels, the answering of letters of enquiry, and the giving of opinions on prints and drawings brought into the Department for identification.

Gere was as devoted to literature as to the visual arts. He could accurately quote substantial chunks of poetry or prose as well as correctly attribute some passage that

might be shown to him out of context. It was therefore

typical of him to see connoisseurship in literary terms, as he did when defining it in his introductory essay to the

catalogue The Achievement of a Connoisseur. Philip Pouncey (1985): "As a literary scholar's first duty must be the es- tablishment of a sound text, so the work of an artist must be correctly reconstructed before any valid critical gen- eralization may be attempted," and he continued with the observation that connoisseurship is "to the history of art as textual criticism is to the history of literature."

His innate artistic and literary gifts, combined with a formidable intelligence, made him a stimulating, though slightly intimidating companion. His conver- sation was witty and elegant, echoing the clarity of

expression of his writing. As a writer, he was a perfec- tionist. All of those who worked closely with him will remember the ceaseless working and reworking of his own prose. At times, his purging of the redundant and his careful burnishing of what remained had a stiffening effect that prevented him from fully expressing what he was so admirably qualified to say. For those who worked under him in the Department of Prints and

Drawings, his insistence on brevity and concision pro- vided an excellent training. Throughout the duration of his keepership, no exhibition catalogue, label, or press release escaped his editorial pen. One sat there at his side as this process took place (and one had to admit that each of his changes was an improvement), the awk- wardness of the occasion mitigated by a string of amus-

ing anecdotes, imitations, and quips, among them the

mocking confession that he had missed his true voca- tion as an editor. Gere had a fine sense of the comic, though the flip side to this aspect of his character was

perhaps too indulgent an eye for idiosyncracy. He was an excellent mimic and his version of the Pope- Hennessy voice was among the most accurate one could hear; he was especially well practiced in this dur-

ing Sir John Pope-Hennessy's brief tenure as Director of the British Museum (1974-77), sometimes replaying to colleagues some reprimand that had been dispensed at the monthly keepers meetings. He was also an amus-

ing caricaturist. His calligraphic doodles in black ball-

point pen had an elegance and lightness of touch that

nicely complemented his other accomplishments. An

aspect of this emerged in a series of modifications to

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company logos (among them frontal lobotomies and other drastic interventions to the profile of James Christie [I730-I803], which, in the late I970s, appeared so prominently on that company's sale catalogues).

Gere had rare good taste. This was manifested in different ways, from choosing drawings for an exhibition to picking a menu for dinner, together with the right wine. A noteworthy expression of his exquisite sense of

quality is the distinguished collection of paintings, wa-

tercolors, and drawings that he assembled with his wife, Charlotte. A well-chosen group of old master drawings, chiefly of the Italian school, is an important constituent of that collection and includes fine examples by such

seventeenth-century artists as Pietro da Cortona and Pierfrancesco Mola, as well as by favorites from the sixteenth century such as Polidoro da Caravaggio, Perino del Vaga, and Taddeo Zuccaro.

Although not a countryman, Gere's love of landscape was passionate. With the escalation of prices of old master drawings, he and Charlotte became determined collectors of plein-air oil sketches on paper, mostly of

Italian views and mostly painted by French artists active at the end of the eighteenth century. These fluently painted, luminous sketches evoke the purity of the Mediterranean countryside of another era, and the walls in their house glitter with these painted vistas. Besides

inviting endless musings, there was the sheer practical problem of whom they were all by, since many had been purchased unattributed for modest sums; here was the connoisseur's ultimate test. To friends, the Geres' enthusiasm for such artists as Valenciennes, Simon

Denis, Gilles-Franqois-Joseph Closson, and Achille-Etna Michallon was infectious, hence their disappointment at the cursory attention paid to their collection when it was recently visited by a large group of professional art historians. But as Gere was in the habit of pointing out, it is a great pity that there are now so many "art historians who in fact rather dislike works of art." His friends and former colleagues, as well as the art-loving general public, can be grateful that he was certainly not one of these.

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j. a. gere, a tribute

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