John Gage, who has died aged 73, was one of Britain’s most original, creative and inspirational art historians; in particular, he transformed the study of JMW Turner and wrote an influential work on the understanding of light and colour in Western art.
The son of an accountant, John Stephen Gage was born at Bromley, Kent, on June 28 1938 and educated at Rye Grammar School. Having gone up to The Queen’s College, Oxford, to read Modern History, he felt stifled by the anti-intellectualism he encountered there and emerged with a heroic third. He then took himself to Florence, where he studied Italian art while supporting himself by teaching English; when he ran out of money, he returned home by bicycle.
Gage later studied under Michael Kitson at the Courtauld Institute, and in 1967 completed the doctoral thesis that would inform his Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (1969) . Before going to the Courtauld, Gage had earned a living teaching in art schools, including the Royal College of Art, and had attracted the attention of Peter Lasko, head of the History of Art department at the University of East Anglia, one of the most exciting places to study the discipline at that time. Lasko resolved to bring Gage to UEA, and his years there, from 1967 to 1979, were among the most creative and contented of his life.
In 1979 he moved to Cambridge, where he served as head of the History of Art department from 1992 to 1995.
Gage was an inspirational and accessible teacher, noted for his humour, generosity and kindness; his complete lack of egotism was a rare quality in a don. As a scholar, his learning and his capacity to link apparently disconnected themes and issues produced exceptional results — notably in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (1993), which won the Mitchell Prize for Art History.
Gage spent three decades preparing this work, despite being told by one publisher that it was not of “sufficient public interest”. His theme was “the way in which the societies of Europe and the United States have shaped and developed their experience of colour”, and he addressed an enormous range of topics, among them ancient colour terminology; heraldry; how the rainbow has been represented in painting; and the history of the palette. The whole was expressed in an effortless and readable prose, and the book was translated into five languages.
In his earlier work, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth, Gage had already shown that he could revolutionise the way people think about painters and painting. He analysed what colour meant to the artist: how Turner himself had perceived it as something with historically-determined meanings, and had drawn on literary, poetic and other cultural themes. More broadly, Gage communicated to his readers that the analysis of the formal aspects of painting did not have to be a dry and unapproachable subject of study.
Gage produced other books about Turner: a study of the painting Rain, Steam and Speed in 1972; the artist’s collected letters in 1980; and A Wonderful Range of Mind (1987) — the title is a quotation about Turner from John Constable, who said after spending an evening with him: “I was a good deal entertained with Turner ... he is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind.” In Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (1999), Gage examined the phenomenon of colour, suggesting that its meaning, like that of language, is contingent on the cultural context in which it is experienced. His many themes included mosaics; colour symbolism in the Middle Ages and illuminated manuscripts; the palette of artists such as Turner, Blake, Seurat and Matisse; and the impact of Newton’s optical discoveries on painting.
Gage also organised many exhibitions, among them, in 1969, “A Decade of English Naturalism, 1810-1820”. This rehabilitated the oil sketches of Constable which had been long ignored. Included in the show were early 19th-century treatises on optics and meteorology, and such objects as the camera obscura, used by painters to make an accurate copy of the motif — touches which helped to change the way we think about historical landscape painting.
Gage was Reader in the History of Western Art at Cambridge from 1995 to 2000, when he retired from academic life to spend more time at his converted farmhouse in Tuscany. But he remained intellectually active, and had lately become increasingly interested in Australian Aboriginal art.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1975 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995.
He married, in 1978 (dissolved 2002), Penelope Kenrick, with whom he had a daughter.
John Gage, born June 28 1938, died February 10 2012
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