Helen Weston ‘in Three Positions’

Helen Weston’s name is inextricably linked with the Department of History of Art at University College London where, in the course of over thirty-five years, she was a lecturer, professor, and Head of Department. However, her academic career began at Reading University, where she studied French as an undergraduate. From there she went on to study for an MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1965 under Anita Brookner. She was to share with Brookner a career-long passion for French art and literature, from Greuze to Delacroix and Diderot to Zola. She wrote her MA dissertation on ‘Pierre-Paul Prud’hon: decorator’. The eminent Pierre Francastel, as she notes, had remarked of this aspect of Prud’hon work, that it was best for the painter’s reputation, his ‘gloire’, not to pay too much attention to it. ‘This study’, she replies ‘deliberately insists and attempts to throw light on precisely this aspect of Prud’hon’s work, for as a decorator, from the Directory to the Bourbon Restoration periods, Prud’hon was an important contributor to the evolution of the Empire style.’ I (KS) quote because to the many who know her, Helen is beloved for her sweetness, and it is a reminder that at work and in print that sweetness is surpassed by an outspoken defence of principle. Here, nothing so conventional as the defence of the unjustly neglected artist, rather, vindication of the decorative, and impatience with that prejudice which too often sets it at naught.

Art · Political and Economic history of UK and US

• Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World

  Open Access•Agnes I Lugo-Ortiz, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz et al.•Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic…•2013

  Add to list

• Representing the Right to Represent

  Open Access•Helen Weston, Helen D Weston•Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics•1994

  Add to list

• The Case for Constance Mayer

  H WESTON, Henry G Weston•Oxford Art Journal•1980

  Add to list