Richard Godfrey

Witty historian of printmaking and engraving

Richard Timothy Godfrey, art historian, teacher and curator: born Portland Dorset 2 July 1945; died London 15 January 2003.

Richard Godfrey was a historian of printmaking and engraving.

His first book, published in 1978, was a seminal study, Printmaking in Britain: a general history from its beginnings to the present day, a work that remains the most readable and wide-ranging survey of the subject. This book led to an invitation to become a Resident Fellow at the newly opened Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut in the autumn of 1979. Godfrey worked there alongside the other leading authority on British prints, David Alexander, and he retained an abiding respect and affection for that institution and its collections where he spent some of his happiest times and forged some of his closest friendships.

The collaboration at Yale with Alexander led to the exhibition "Painters and Engravers: the reproductive print from Hogarth to Wilkie" that showed for the first time in the spring of 1980 some of the highlights of one of the lesser known aspects of Paul Mellon's great collection of British art. Soon after, Godfrey began work (with John Riely) on the exhibition "English Caricature 1620 to the Present", held at the Yale Center for British Art, the Library of Congress in Washington and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1984.

Although teaching and writing had seemed to be his natural milieu, Godfrey surprised his friends when in 1984 he accepted a post in the Old Master Prints Department of the auctioneer Sotheby's. His considerable knowledge and connoisseurship in the field certainly equipped him well for the more academic aspects of his new post, but his comparative lack of worldliness did not make this transition to the commercial world an entirely happy experience for him and he perhaps never felt entirely at ease in Bond Street. Nevertheless, his extensive travels in the course of his work gave him the opportunity to familiarise himself with most of Europe and North America's great print collections, both public and private.

His work with Sotheby's inevitably curtailed his scholarly activities, but he still found time to write articles and reviews for Print Quarterly and to curate and write the excellent catalogue for a spectacularly beautiful exhibition, "Wenceslaus Hollar: a Bohemian artist in England", held at the Yale Center for British Art in 1994.

Caricature remained Godfrey's first love, not least because it gave him licence to indulge his mischievous sense of humour with his innate understanding of the subtleties of caricaturists' pens. He had a special affinity with the work of James Gillray and, as it transpired, his last work was to curate the very successful exhibition of that artist's work held at Tate Britain in 2001.

Richard Timothy Godfrey was born at Portland, Dorset, in 1945, the middle of three sons of the Rev John Godfrey, FSA, a clergyman-scholar in the old tradition of the Church of England, who wrote books on medieval history. Although there was no history of making or looking at art in his family, Richard Godfrey's early interests were strongly visual. He was educated at Rossall School in Lancashire and subsequently at Salisbury and Chelsea Art Schools. At Chelsea he obtained a BA in painting and an MA in art history.

Although he apparently showed some talent as an etcher, he was never satisfied with his efforts and always felt more instinctively at ease when writing about the creative process. His scholarly bent led him to take a lectureship at Colchester School of Art where he taught art history throughout the 1970s. He was a gifted teacher and a brilliant lecturer and, 30 years on, many of those artists taught by him at Colchester remember him with great affection.

In 1980 he began teaching art history for Wake Forest University, of North Carolina, one of the numerous American universities who were then establishing "Semester Abroad" programmes in London and, soon after, he simultaneously took up a similar post with New York University.

Godfrey wrote effortlessly elegant prose that matched his conversational wit and eye for the absurd. He had a remarkable gift for friendship and his many friends will recall the happiest of times spent in his company on social occasions. Dinner parties chez Godfrey were rather bohemian affairs. Culinary sophistication was not his forte but, typically, bangers and mash would be washed down with copious quantities of wine and gales of laughter. To have Richard Godfrey as one's host or simply of the party would guarantee a riotously amusing evening.

His boyish good looks and sense of humour meant that he was always attractive to women, but he never married. He had a particular gift for putting children at ease and he always delighted in the company of his godchildren and the children of his many friends.

Brian Allen