- 3 June 2025
We are saddened to hear that David Bindman (1940–2025) Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University College London and Fellow of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University, has passed away after a short illness.
David has been an immensely influential figure in British art over the last sixty years, writing on Blake (the subject of his first published article in 1966), Hogarth, Roubiliac, the French Revolution and caricature, and race and representation. His book Blake as an Artist (1977) endures as a key text, while his Hogarth for the World in Art series (1981) remains a standard introduction to the artist. His publications for the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) include Karl Friedrich Schinkel “The English Journey” (with Gottfried Reimann, 1993) and the multiple-award-winning Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument (with Malcolm Baker, 1995). He was a founding figure in the multi-volume project Image of the Black in Western Art (2006 to date) and co-editor of thirteen volumes in the series.
Alongside this prolific record of academic publication, David curated many seminal exhibitions setting British art in its historical and international contexts, including on Flaxman and the industrial revolution (London and Hamburg 1979); Blake and his circle (Yale Center for British Art, 1982); the French Revolution (London, Manchester and Vizelle, 1989); and most recently on Blake and Europe at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
David’s impact as a scholar, teacher, curator, colleague and friend has been extraordinarily deep and wide-ranging. He was involved in PMC from the outset, in 1968 contributing a draft article on Blake for the multi-volume Dictionary of British Art projected by the original Paul Mellon Foundation, teaching on the Yale in London programme in the 1980s and serving on the Advisory Council, among much else. Many people at PMC, past and present, have been touched by his scholarship and his commitment to the discipline, his generous, collaborative spirit, kindness and good humour. He will be greatly missed.