Edward Morris (1940–2016)

Abstract

Edward Morris, who died on 29 May 2016, was on the editorial board of this journal from its foundation in 1999 until 2001, and has earned himself a tribute in its pages, perhaps above all for his heroic efforts on behalf of the PMSA's National Recording Project. He was chair of the NRP editorial board virtually from the outset, and it was largely thanks to him that 17 volumes, including his own, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside (2012), have been published, and that several more are in preparation. This selfless editorial labour was not his only contribution to sculpture studies, and was itself a kind of coda to the art-historical and curatorial experiences of a lifetime. This is how it appears in retrospect, but it was hardly an outcome that those like myself, who knew him as a student at the Courtauld in the 1960s, or even Edward as a student, could have foreseen.The fact that he was born in the early stages of the Second World War, the son of an officer in the Royal Navy, may account for the deep-rooted sobriety of his character, offset, admittedly, by a fairly acute sense of the ridiculous in life generally. His education at first followed a standard patrician pattern of prep school, Rugby, and a BA in history at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1959). Between school and university he briefly taught English in Spain, and in the process improved his own Spanish. His interest in art appears to have grown during a five-year period spent working in the City. A college friend remembers their going together to Spain, and his being brought up to scratch on Romanesque architecture by Edward, who had read Kenneth Conant's recently published Pelican, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800-1200. In 1964 Edward enrolled for an MA course at the Courtauld, and was perhaps upset to find that the institute's medievalists were not impressed by Conant. His courses there were on French eighteenth-century painting with Anita Brookner and seventeenth-century landscape with Michael Kitson and Anthony Blunt. In his conversation at that time he showed an awe-inspiring familiarity with nineteenth-century authors, from Stendhal to Henry James, through Ruskin and the less fashionable Thackeray.It was at the Courtauld that Edward met his wife, Penny, and both of them were lucky enough to find congenial work in Liverpool at the end of their courses in 1966. His grounding in nineteenth-century history and literature were excellent qualifications for work at the Walker Art Gallery, where he was to remain as curator up to his retirement in 1999. It was at this period that Mary Bennett was spearheading the exposure of Pre-Raphaelite painters at the Walker, but the gallery's holdings of nineteenth-century art were impressively international, and Edward took a special interest in the French paintings. Despite some recent efforts to bring this area into conformity with twentieth-century priorities, with purchases of works by Monet and Degas, Edward was not at all unhappy that the bulk of the collection still reflected the tastes of Liverpool's mercantile classes from the early days. His researches in this area were to culminate much later with the publication of his ambitious volume, French Art in Nineteenth Century Britain, published by Yale University Press in 2005. By this time substantial advances had been made in exploring the activities of French sculptors in Victorian Britain, and these contributed to the rich texture of the book. In 1994, the Walker Art Gallery, under Edward's watch, had acquired, with the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund, an important French sculpture executed for an English destination: Henri Chapu's marble effigy of the Duchess of Nemours (1883), from the Orleans family oratory in the church of St Charles Borromeo, Weybridge.With the man who was his boss in those crucial days, Timothy Stevens, Edward gave a detailed account of the extraordinary boom for Liverpool's museums and galleries in the late 1980s. …