We at the Courtauld Institute are deeply saddened by the death of Professor David Bindman (1940-2025). Professor Bindman was Durning-Lawrence Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at UCL. From 1983-1987 and 1992-1998, he served as a member of the Courtauld’s Management Committee. He obtained his PhD at the Courtauld in 1972 under the supervision of Anthony Blunt.
David’s contribution to the field of art history is immense. His first book, Blake as an Artist (1977), based on his Courtauld dissertation, remains a milestone in studies of the artist, placing Blake’s visual work on the same footing as that of his poetry. A lifetime’s dedication to the study of Blake resulted in many books and exhibitions, the last of which, William Blake’s Universe, was co-curated at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Hamburger Kunsthalle with the Courtauld’s Dr Esther Chadwick in 2024.
His highly original, deeply researched writings on John Flaxman, William Hogarth, Louis-François Roubilliac and a host of eighteenth-century British and European artists joined those on Blake. David’s work on race and aesthetics was similarly ground-breaking. With Henry Louis Gates Jr., David was series editor for The Image of the Black in Western Art, a monumental undertaking that has underpinned new approaches to the history of Black portraiture and representation in recent years. His book Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (2002) was followed in 2023 by ‘Race is Everything’: Art and Human Difference, which examined the intersections of art and racial science in the nineteenth century.
In everything he did, David combined a sense of warmth, kindness and wit. His work was rooted in an abiding passion for objects and artworks themselves. To younger scholars he was tremendously generous and supportive, and his intellectual curiosity and liveliness remained undimmed. We celebrate his magnificent career and mourn a great loss to the art historical community.
