Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968)

Extract

I have just returned from the burial of Herbert Read at Kirkdale Minster, in the same remote churchyard where he himself saw his father buried, by the church of grey stone with slated roof and against the dark wood of firs.

As I try to collect my thoughts about him, I wonder if others will find it easier than myself to say what he stood for most. He had many friends and many audiences, but they were often, I think, isolated from each other. Teachers and children inspirited by his books or presence to find new confidence in their own painting might be dismayed by the bloodless forms of geometrical art which he praised elsewhere; painters and sculptors of the vanguard, who owed him much and who often seemed his predilection, were baffled perhaps by his acceptance of this or that Old Master, by his enjoyment of eighteenth-century porcelain or glass, by his admiration of recent things that were not of the vanguard at all—the early ‘non-abstract’ work of Ben Nicholson, the engravings and paintings of David Jones, the pictures and letters of Stanley Spencer, certain drawings of children by Eric Gill. His continued encouragement of new and experimental writers went side by side with an unquenchable devotion to Shelley and Emily Bronte, to Flaubert and Henry James; and the acute and sensitive interpreter of these classics was perhaps not known also as the masterly and precise and imaginative writer of The Green Child and the autobiographies.