Visual Culture in Britain is extremely sad to announce the recent death of one of its founding editorial board members, Dr Paul Barlow. Paul maintained a continual and always lively commitment to the journal since it launched in 2000. His extraordinary breadth of knowledge across an astonishing range of subjects made him an excellent peer reviewer, benefiting contributors with immensely painstaking and detailed reports. The very same qualities made him also an invaluable, witty and consistent participant in research activities here at the University of Northumbria, where we were colleagues in the Department of Arts. In these contexts alone he is an enormous loss. He is also a most considerable loss to the study of nineteenth-century art history and visual culture, and here too the journal benefited from his penetrating research on William Blake, on the death of history painting in nineteenth-century art and, most recently, on Ford Madox Brown. His writings on Brown appeared in a recent themed issue on the artist co-edited by his longstanding friend, the art historian Colin Trodd. We are pleased to include here Colin’s own assessment of Paul’s contribution.
Ysanne Holt
Dept of Arts
University of Northumbria
(Editor, Visual Culture in Britain, 2000–2014)
Paul Barlow was a pioneering and iconoclastic academic, and his bold and stunning ideas transformed our understanding of the intellectual life of British art three times over. In the mid-1980s he baffled and shocked many members of the Art History Department at the University of Sussex when he declared that his PhD would be on Pre-Raphaelitism and Victorian culture, not the critical modelling of Raphael in academic art theory. Paul’s thesis – supported by a set of dazzling readings of the fluid critical relations between the Pre-Raphaelites and their long-neglected rivals, The Clique – was a path-breaking account of the struggle of ideas in the mid-nineteenth-century British art world. Here, and in many subsequent productions, he analysed in meticulous detail, and with the authority of overwhelming scholarship, the critical rivalry between different systems of pictorial rhetoric, and different ways of framing narrative and composing visions of experience. Over the next fifteen years he produced a number of brilliant articles, essays and chapters on diverse subjects, including the importance of ideas of character, expression and creative personality in the cultural development of the National Portrait Gallery; the role of national memory and communal life in the institutional formalization of visual culture; Ford Madox Brown’s neo-Hogarthianism and the modification of public history in the Manchester Town Hall Murals; the internalization of the grotesque in Victorian art, letters and discourse; and the spell of avant-gardist logic in academic accounts of Victorian painting. Many of these preoccupations were addressed in his superb Time Present and Time Past (2005), which uncovered, with extraordinary subtlety, the different forms of visual thinking in paintings by John Everett Millais and his contemporaries. The same year he co-edited a Special Edition of Visual Culture in Britain, which contained a remarkable article on articulations of intimacy in Victorian art, culture and criticism. More recently he turned his attention to William Blake, writing perceptively about the various upheavals in Blake’s late works, as well as his cultural afterlife in early-twentieth-century discourses. Paul’s final publication, a tour de force reading of Ford Madox Brown’s Work (Visual Culture in Britain, 15: 3, 2014), broadens our understanding of this wonderfully complex painting. Seen as a whole, his greatest achievement was to relocate critical examination of Victorian visual culture by insisting on the need to recover the pictorial, visual and historical conditions in which particular artefacts came into being, entered the critical imagination and circulated in cultural discourse. His abiding qualities – an intensity of vision and insight – will inspire future generations of researchers in his many areas of expertise.