David Bindman’s scholarship on the art of 18th- and early 19th-century Britain will illuminate the sculpture of Roubiliac and Flaxman, and the paintings and prints of Hogarth and Blake for generations to come. There are others much better qualified than me to celebrate in detail his innovative and insightful work on these artists and others, and those whom he taught, or with whom he taught, will explain his enormous influence and share favourite ‘Bindweed’ stories. But I met him first when I was only nine, on an island in the Thames, with his wife Frances Carey, who can only just have started her curatorial career at the British Museum. So I have known him nearly all of my life. The Fitzwilliam Museum – a favourite place – bookended his career, more literally than usual, beginning with his 1970 catalogue of our Blake holdings and, very recently, the book accompanying what was to be his last major exhibition: William Blake’s Universe, co-curated with Esther Chadwick in 2024.
My first memory of David, to be honest, is not very sharp, but it does now feel incongruous. I don’t imagine that small islands were really David’s thing – he was always poised for a walk, living on the nursery slopes of Parliament Hill, and he roamed, without fuss or fanfare, very wide in his research. Indeed, David’s embrace was capacious, and a revolutionary flame burned bright within him, steady, clear, a beacon for many of us. I am not talking here just of David’s capacity for friendship, which could bind – his surname was an appropriate one – pupils and colleagues into families. Nor of his political views, which were broadly left wing, shaped by a grammar-school education and his upbringing in the north-east. But these characteristics were also embodied in what he achieved as an art historian at Westfield College, UCL and Harvard, with what and whom he chose to study and analyse (extending much further than his monographic work), and, not least, how he set about it.
Some other memories of David that help paint a picture. My family met him through his older brother, the human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Bindman, who had worked with my mother at the Race Relations Board. Geoffrey was, like my grandfather, a Jewish member of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. So early on I probably made assumptions about David’s own political beliefs – but I don’t think they were very far off the mark. David believed in public service, public education, public ownership (which is one of the reasons museum collections mattered to him), in causes that made people’s lives better. He was a radical drawn to radicals and, again, that shows in his art history.
Print of The Blood of the Murdered crying for Vengeance (1793) by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey; used on the inside cover of the catalogue by David Bindman that accompanied the exhibition ‘The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution’ at the British Museum in 1989. © The Trustees of the British Museum; published under a Creative Commons licence [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]
He interviewed me in 1983 for an undergraduate place to study art history at Westfield, then an independent college, comfortably red brick, just off the Finchley Road. His good companion there, Caroline Elam, knew me too well through another family connection to grill me unbiasedly. David had met me only that one time, but he made sure that he was accompanied by a third member of the team who didn’t know me. He was very gentle. His main aim seemed to be to get the most from the candidates he was seeing, and there was no fierce photo test or any intention to unsettle – just questions that got me talking comfortably, relaxed enough to start exploring despite the testing circumstances. My Courtauld resolve was briefly shaken but I was pleased to discover that Westfield teaching might be available to Courtauld students too.
In the end, Renaissance-bound, I studied with Caroline not David. But I sometimes went to his lectures, because I’d liked him and I liked them. Then in 1989, when I was a PhD student, I saw his British Museum exhibition, ‘The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution’, which covered the British reaction to the stirring, shocking events in France. It was astonishing – so confident in its range of media, and in the way it included objects and images that certainly weren’t part of the Courtauld canon I was familiar with – including works of high art, sculpture for example, about which he was always deeply knowledgeable and passionate, but also and mainly low: prints, broadsheets and satirical tokens, caricatures, ceramics (including lots of Wedgwood), satirical tokens, and even the more gruesome of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. Seen together, the exhibits formed an intensely exciting multitude. The work was completely rigorous. David used art objects of all kinds as evidence, and multiple, nuanced contexts were adduced. After Oxford, he had studied at the Courtauld, with Anthony Blunt, but I’m guessing that he’d needed to leave that somewhat restrictive island. To me at that moment, the exhibition felt revolutionary in ways that went far beyond its subject matter.
Mark Jones wrote the entries on the tokens and medals in that show, but David was deeply committed to the material. A few years before that, with David by then installed at UCL after Queen Mary’s had absorbed Westfield, and with me in the BM’s Coins and Medals Department, we co-taught a yearly handling session for his students working on the art of the French Revolution. He was a wonderful teacher, still asking gentle, demanding questions, but sitting in the students room, with trays of tokens and medals in front of him, he got more and more absorbed, his voice quieter and quieter, looking up less and less. I think that things from a vivid past were more real than anything else when he had them in his hands, before his eyes.
Print of The Hopes of the Party! or the Darling Children of Democracy! (1798) by an anonymous artist, published by William Holland; used on the front cover of the catalogue by David Bindman that accompanied the exhibition ‘The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution’ at the British Museum in 1989. © The Trustees of the British Museum; published under a Creative Commons licence [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]
Just because his tastes were all-encompassing doesn’t mean that he took exactly the same pleasure in all the things he treasured, or that he’d moved away from the view that art history starts with the objects: the works of art, and not-art. His work and his teaching always began with a viewing that respected the essence of the objects he was examining and, ideally, handling. Looking with him at the Flaxman plasters at UCL was to see him in curatorial mode. And he was an addicted collector. I think the great, papery, glittery stream of items arriving at the Parliament Hill flat drove Frances, who could satisfy any collecting urges she might have at the BM, potty, not least because David never noticed how big or small anything was going to be. He was still bidding for new finds in the last weeks of his life. So she and he were also great givers-away. I hope it’s fair to say that it’s mainly his collecting that is reflected in their joint gifts to the Prints and Drawings department. Though I have watched him lecturing on YouTube, nothing in the days following his death conjured David more vividly than browsing his varied list of BM donations.
We would meet sometimes at openings and conferences, enough to go on feeling connected. I watched him set up the UCL/BM history of the print MA that has produced so many leading scholars. I went on reading his books and articles – especially on sculpture. I was delighted when I arrived at the Fitzwilliam to find David already installed as co-curator of an exhibition that would use our extraordinary Blake holdings as its starting point to explore parallels in his work with German peers – Friedrich and especially Philipp Otto Runge – as well as the English contemporaries Blake knew well. It was typical that David spoke, early on, to curators in the museums he hoped would lend, some of them his former students. Their willingness to approve these loans was testimony to their esteem and their collective excitement about the project. By starting with a question about a German connection that was primarily spiritual and philosophical rather than personal (Blake never went anywhere), David and Esther stressed aspects of Blake that, even after David’s earlier work, felt fresh and unexpected – insights into pan-European methods of instilling the classical tradition, into Blake’s commercial activity as an engraver of book illustrations after images that were not his own, but above all into how attitudes might be shared in turbulent times – to the historical and pseudo-historical, to revolution, and to salvation. Thanks to a relationship that lasted more than 50 years, David knew the Fitzwilliam’s prints, drawings and paintings by Blake back to front, and the project elicited memories for him of his long association with the Keynes family, who had owned so many. His enjoyment of the exhibition hang was palpable. He loved being in the galleries as the loans arrived and as Fitz works went up on the walls. Once again, it was the things, the works of art, that came to the fore even as he helped us think more imaginatively than before about the ties that bind artists even if they never met. There – that word again.
The Ancient of Days; Europe a Prophecy frontispiece (1794), William Blake. Photo: © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
The exhibition was delayed by Covid-19 and the resulting logjam of exhibitions in the years after, but David and Esther and our partners in Hamburg were patient. I went with him to Germany and watched him once again become completely absorbed in the Runge drawings we were to borrow. When last year the show travelled from Cambridge to Hamburg, it was wonderful to see David fêted, fully deserving of the applause he received on opening night when he explained that this was another full-circle moment for him, returning to work with an institution that had involved him more than once in its 1970s investigations of 19th-century European art. German art had been important to him from that moment, and this too was a love he shared with Frances.
While he was working with us he enjoyed watching, from an appropriate distance, two other Fitzwilliam exhibitions shaping up: ‘Defaced!’, about the illegal stamping of political slogans on to coins and banknotes, and ‘Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance’, which looked at the material and visual legacies of the trade in enslaved African people. I now realise that neither of these shows could have happened without his work. ‘Black Atlantic’ in particular was shaped by reference to the 13 volumes of The Image of the Black in Western Art (2006–), so fundamental, that he co-edited with his friend Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates Jr, and this was the subject of one of his very last publications. The last time I saw him was fleetingly in the Fitzwilliam cafe, where he was having lunch after seeing ‘Rise Up’, the sequel to ‘Black Atlantic’. Characteristically, he’d enjoyed the exhibition’s star loans, such as Gainsborough’s portrait of Ignatius Sancho, over from Ottawa, but also the Cambridge playbills of Ira Aldridge that have recently been unearthed in the Cambridge City Archive and the transfer-printed jug the Fitzwilliam has acquired in celebration of Abolition. He was still finding the joy in the high and low and everything in between.
It is this quality that for many, especially at this difficult moment, will be his chief legacy. He changed and deepened our understanding of several great artists, but he also shone light into what were, when he set out, shadowy corners – not just in terms of medium and aesthetic status, but also because he was thinking earlier than many about art-making and race and class and gender. His was an approach of ‘and’ not ‘or’. David combined a love of art and artefacts with a love of ideas and a comprehensive, always curious knowledge of his period. There is much at stake at this moment as a battle rages, and not just in the United States, about how complete, complex and inclusive the study of art and culture should be. We are currently in a world which favours single-truth explanations of the past, where argument becomes quickly polarised. David Bindman showed us a way to navigate these stormy seas: by casting his net wide, by valuing lots of things and lots of people at the same time, by asking and debating difficult questions and making it feel safe to do so. We’ll miss his warmth and his wisdom and his radicalism as we sail on without him. But our cargo is all the richer for David and his art history. And he has set us an example that will live on.
The Large Morning (Der Grosse Morgen) (1808–09), Philipp Otto Runge. Hamburger Kunsthalle. Photo: Elke Walford; © Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk
Luke Syson is the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
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‘A revolutionary flame burned bright within him’: David Bindman (1940–2025)
David Bindman in 2016
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David Bindman’s scholarship on the art of 18th- and early 19th-century Britain will illuminate the sculpture of Roubiliac and Flaxman, and the paintings and prints of Hogarth and Blake for generations to come. There are others much better qualified than me to celebrate in detail his innovative and insightful work on these artists and others, and those whom he taught, or with whom he taught, will explain his enormous influence and share favourite ‘Bindweed’ stories. But I met him first when I was only nine, on an island in the Thames, with his wife Frances Carey, who can only just have started her curatorial career at the British Museum. So I have known him nearly all of my life. The Fitzwilliam Museum – a favourite place – bookended his career, more literally than usual, beginning with his 1970 catalogue of our Blake holdings and, very recently, the book accompanying what was to be his last major exhibition: William Blake’s Universe, co-curated with Esther Chadwick in 2024.
My first memory of David, to be honest, is not very sharp, but it does now feel incongruous. I don’t imagine that small islands were really David’s thing – he was always poised for a walk, living on the nursery slopes of Parliament Hill, and he roamed, without fuss or fanfare, very wide in his research. Indeed, David’s embrace was capacious, and a revolutionary flame burned bright within him, steady, clear, a beacon for many of us. I am not talking here just of David’s capacity for friendship, which could bind – his surname was an appropriate one – pupils and colleagues into families. Nor of his political views, which were broadly left wing, shaped by a grammar-school education and his upbringing in the north-east. But these characteristics were also embodied in what he achieved as an art historian at Westfield College, UCL and Harvard, with what and whom he chose to study and analyse (extending much further than his monographic work), and, not least, how he set about it.
Some other memories of David that help paint a picture. My family met him through his older brother, the human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Bindman, who had worked with my mother at the Race Relations Board. Geoffrey was, like my grandfather, a Jewish member of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. So early on I probably made assumptions about David’s own political beliefs – but I don’t think they were very far off the mark. David believed in public service, public education, public ownership (which is one of the reasons museum collections mattered to him), in causes that made people’s lives better. He was a radical drawn to radicals and, again, that shows in his art history.
Print of The Blood of the Murdered crying for Vengeance (1793) by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey; used on the inside cover of the catalogue by David Bindman that accompanied the exhibition ‘The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution’ at the British Museum in 1989. © The Trustees of the British Museum; published under a Creative Commons licence [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]
He interviewed me in 1983 for an undergraduate place to study art history at Westfield, then an independent college, comfortably red brick, just off the Finchley Road. His good companion there, Caroline Elam, knew me too well through another family connection to grill me unbiasedly. David had met me only that one time, but he made sure that he was accompanied by a third member of the team who didn’t know me. He was very gentle. His main aim seemed to be to get the most from the candidates he was seeing, and there was no fierce photo test or any intention to unsettle – just questions that got me talking comfortably, relaxed enough to start exploring despite the testing circumstances. My Courtauld resolve was briefly shaken but I was pleased to discover that Westfield teaching might be available to Courtauld students too.
In the end, Renaissance-bound, I studied with Caroline not David. But I sometimes went to his lectures, because I’d liked him and I liked them. Then in 1989, when I was a PhD student, I saw his British Museum exhibition, ‘The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution’, which covered the British reaction to the stirring, shocking events in France. It was astonishing – so confident in its range of media, and in the way it included objects and images that certainly weren’t part of the Courtauld canon I was familiar with – including works of high art, sculpture for example, about which he was always deeply knowledgeable and passionate, but also and mainly low: prints, broadsheets and satirical tokens, caricatures, ceramics (including lots of Wedgwood), satirical tokens, and even the more gruesome of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. Seen together, the exhibits formed an intensely exciting multitude. The work was completely rigorous. David used art objects of all kinds as evidence, and multiple, nuanced contexts were adduced. After Oxford, he had studied at the Courtauld, with Anthony Blunt, but I’m guessing that he’d needed to leave that somewhat restrictive island. To me at that moment, the exhibition felt revolutionary in ways that went far beyond its subject matter.
Mark Jones wrote the entries on the tokens and medals in that show, but David was deeply committed to the material. A few years before that, with David by then installed at UCL after Queen Mary’s had absorbed Westfield, and with me in the BM’s Coins and Medals Department, we co-taught a yearly handling session for his students working on the art of the French Revolution. He was a wonderful teacher, still asking gentle, demanding questions, but sitting in the students room, with trays of tokens and medals in front of him, he got more and more absorbed, his voice quieter and quieter, looking up less and less. I think that things from a vivid past were more real than anything else when he had them in his hands, before his eyes.
Print of The Hopes of the Party! or the Darling Children of Democracy! (1798) by an anonymous artist, published by William Holland; used on the front cover of the catalogue by David Bindman that accompanied the exhibition ‘The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution’ at the British Museum in 1989. © The Trustees of the British Museum; published under a Creative Commons licence [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]
Just because his tastes were all-encompassing doesn’t mean that he took exactly the same pleasure in all the things he treasured, or that he’d moved away from the view that art history starts with the objects: the works of art, and not-art. His work and his teaching always began with a viewing that respected the essence of the objects he was examining and, ideally, handling. Looking with him at the Flaxman plasters at UCL was to see him in curatorial mode. And he was an addicted collector. I think the great, papery, glittery stream of items arriving at the Parliament Hill flat drove Frances, who could satisfy any collecting urges she might have at the BM, potty, not least because David never noticed how big or small anything was going to be. He was still bidding for new finds in the last weeks of his life. So she and he were also great givers-away. I hope it’s fair to say that it’s mainly his collecting that is reflected in their joint gifts to the Prints and Drawings department. Though I have watched him lecturing on YouTube, nothing in the days following his death conjured David more vividly than browsing his varied list of BM donations.
We would meet sometimes at openings and conferences, enough to go on feeling connected. I watched him set up the UCL/BM history of the print MA that has produced so many leading scholars. I went on reading his books and articles – especially on sculpture. I was delighted when I arrived at the Fitzwilliam to find David already installed as co-curator of an exhibition that would use our extraordinary Blake holdings as its starting point to explore parallels in his work with German peers – Friedrich and especially Philipp Otto Runge – as well as the English contemporaries Blake knew well. It was typical that David spoke, early on, to curators in the museums he hoped would lend, some of them his former students. Their willingness to approve these loans was testimony to their esteem and their collective excitement about the project. By starting with a question about a German connection that was primarily spiritual and philosophical rather than personal (Blake never went anywhere), David and Esther stressed aspects of Blake that, even after David’s earlier work, felt fresh and unexpected – insights into pan-European methods of instilling the classical tradition, into Blake’s commercial activity as an engraver of book illustrations after images that were not his own, but above all into how attitudes might be shared in turbulent times – to the historical and pseudo-historical, to revolution, and to salvation. Thanks to a relationship that lasted more than 50 years, David knew the Fitzwilliam’s prints, drawings and paintings by Blake back to front, and the project elicited memories for him of his long association with the Keynes family, who had owned so many. His enjoyment of the exhibition hang was palpable. He loved being in the galleries as the loans arrived and as Fitz works went up on the walls. Once again, it was the things, the works of art, that came to the fore even as he helped us think more imaginatively than before about the ties that bind artists even if they never met. There – that word again.
The Ancient of Days; Europe a Prophecy frontispiece (1794), William Blake. Photo: © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
The exhibition was delayed by Covid-19 and the resulting logjam of exhibitions in the years after, but David and Esther and our partners in Hamburg were patient. I went with him to Germany and watched him once again become completely absorbed in the Runge drawings we were to borrow. When last year the show travelled from Cambridge to Hamburg, it was wonderful to see David fêted, fully deserving of the applause he received on opening night when he explained that this was another full-circle moment for him, returning to work with an institution that had involved him more than once in its 1970s investigations of 19th-century European art. German art had been important to him from that moment, and this too was a love he shared with Frances.
While he was working with us he enjoyed watching, from an appropriate distance, two other Fitzwilliam exhibitions shaping up: ‘Defaced!’, about the illegal stamping of political slogans on to coins and banknotes, and ‘Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance’, which looked at the material and visual legacies of the trade in enslaved African people. I now realise that neither of these shows could have happened without his work. ‘Black Atlantic’ in particular was shaped by reference to the 13 volumes of The Image of the Black in Western Art (2006–), so fundamental, that he co-edited with his friend Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates Jr, and this was the subject of one of his very last publications. The last time I saw him was fleetingly in the Fitzwilliam cafe, where he was having lunch after seeing ‘Rise Up’, the sequel to ‘Black Atlantic’. Characteristically, he’d enjoyed the exhibition’s star loans, such as Gainsborough’s portrait of Ignatius Sancho, over from Ottawa, but also the Cambridge playbills of Ira Aldridge that have recently been unearthed in the Cambridge City Archive and the transfer-printed jug the Fitzwilliam has acquired in celebration of Abolition. He was still finding the joy in the high and low and everything in between.
It is this quality that for many, especially at this difficult moment, will be his chief legacy. He changed and deepened our understanding of several great artists, but he also shone light into what were, when he set out, shadowy corners – not just in terms of medium and aesthetic status, but also because he was thinking earlier than many about art-making and race and class and gender. His was an approach of ‘and’ not ‘or’. David combined a love of art and artefacts with a love of ideas and a comprehensive, always curious knowledge of his period. There is much at stake at this moment as a battle rages, and not just in the United States, about how complete, complex and inclusive the study of art and culture should be. We are currently in a world which favours single-truth explanations of the past, where argument becomes quickly polarised. David Bindman showed us a way to navigate these stormy seas: by casting his net wide, by valuing lots of things and lots of people at the same time, by asking and debating difficult questions and making it feel safe to do so. We’ll miss his warmth and his wisdom and his radicalism as we sail on without him. But our cargo is all the richer for David and his art history. And he has set us an example that will live on.
The Large Morning (Der Grosse Morgen) (1808–09), Philipp Otto Runge. Hamburger Kunsthalle. Photo: Elke Walford; © Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk
Luke Syson is the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
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