When the 18th-century Italian artist Antonio Canaletto was unable to find a buyer for his 8ft-wide painting Chelsea from the Thames at Battersea Reach (1751) he cut it in two, possibly believing that the two halves would fetch more apart. The left half remained in Britain, finding its way to Blickling Hall, a Jacobean mansion in Norfolk now run by the National Trust. The right half was eventually bought by a Cuban railway tycoon who bequeathed it to the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana shortly before the revolution.
During his 27 years as adviser and later curator of pictures and sculptures for the National Trust, Alastair Laing made several overtures to the Cuban authorities about reuniting the two halves, one of several works Canaletto painted during a ten-year stay in London. He told how the painting may have been commissioned by Chelsea Hospital, which features in the Cuban half, “whereas our side has no distinguishing features”. However, the politics of the time meant that his requests were in vain.
Meanwhile, Laing, an erudite and enthusiastic art historian, was going about the daunting task of scrupulously cataloguing the trust’s 8,500 paintings, four fifths of them ancestral portraits, and 1,000 sculptures scattered around more than 200 collections in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. “Most of my time was devoted to the continuous process of cataloguing the pictures in the various historic houses and writing summaries for guidebooks,” he said.
Everyday responsibility for the trust’s art lay with the individual property manager. “It was my duty to advise them on the hanging and rehanging of pictures, on acquisitions and lending, on conservation, cleaning and restoration,” he explained. “In my occasional talks to volunteers and room stewards I tried to improve their knowledge of their collections.”
While his work was methodical in nature, there were occasional upsets, such as the 1989 fire at Uppark House, in West Sussex, an intimate 1690s house with superb 18th-century interiors. “The top floor, containing mainly family objects, was totally lost. The contents of the main lower area could be evacuated in time,” he recalled.
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The highlight of his career with the trust was the much-admired In Trust for the Nation exhibition, which ran at the new Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery during the winter of 1995-96 when many of the trust’s houses were closed. Forming part of the trust’s centenary celebrations, it brought together much of the organisation’s finest art including paintings by Rembrandt, Turner and Van Dyck, in what was effectively a mini-history of British collecting tastes through the centuries. If there was a unifying theme, it was that “shining through this exhibition is a love of the actual, what Nikolaus Pevsner identified as the English love of real and actual things”, Laing told The Times.
Elsewhere, Laing was admired for his work on the French artist François Boucher (1703-70) and was co-curator of the Boucher exhibition of 1986-87 that was seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Grand Palais, Paris. Boucher’s La vie champêtre, which is in the trust’s Belton House, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, was, he said, among his favourite works, “not only because of my professional interest in the work of this artist, but because, having persuaded its then owner to lend it to the Boucher exhibition in 1986-87, she angelically left it in her will to the house in which it had previously hung for two centuries”.
For many years he had been working on a catalogue raisonné of Boucher’s drawings. “I have accumulated a lot of documentation in the past, but there is still a great deal of work to be done,” he said in 2013. It remains to be completed.
Alastair David Laing (pronounced Lang) was born in Woking, Surrey, in 1944, the second of three children of Malcolm Laing, a civil engineer, and his wife Margaret, known as Clare (née Briscoe); he is survived by his younger sister, Pamela. He was educated at Bradfield College, Berkshire, and read history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, explaining that “in those days art history was not yet a degree subject”. He then took a one-year diploma in art history.
A year with the Foreign Office ended after a run-in with the Italian police while on holiday in Naples. He was arrested with another young diplomat for “obscene acts” and though it seems no charges were brought against him the National Archives file on the case will remain sealed until 2056.
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Afterwards he worked as a translator and night-time telephone exchange operator. He also enrolled at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, starting on “a never-finished thesis on the origins of early south-German Rococo stucco under the supervision of Anthony Blunt”, who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy and with whom he was co-author of Baroque & Rococo: Architecture and Decoration (1978).
These studies involved a period in 1968 in Munich. During that time he visited Czechoslovakia, where he met Hana Novotna, a neuropsychologist. Although Hana was not permitted to leave the country, and while pressure of work meant that his future visits were infrequent, the pair remained in contact until she was finally able to move to Britain a decade later. They were married in 1979 and she survives him with their son, Sam, a language teacher.
Laing told how he truly learnt his profession while cataloguing mannerist and baroque paintings at the Heim Gallery in London. “That way you get to know works of art in all their different aspects,” he told Codart. After a spell as an editor for the Macmillan Dictionary of Art he joined the National Trust in April 1986, initially as adviser on pictures and later adding sculpture to his responsibilities.
Looking back at how the trust has changed in recent years, he described both the positive and negative consequences of its increasing emphasis on accessibility. “It is wonderful to have people enjoy historic houses and gardens, but it should happen in a way that highlights the qualities of the houses and the collections,” he said. He hoped that the trust would to some extent return to celebrating its historic houses and their collections for what they are, adding: “The present need always ‘to tell stories’ somehow diminishes the emphasis on the houses, their inhabitants and the collections for their own sake. Our wonderful houses are exciting enough as they are, we don’t have to make them exciting artificially.”
In retirement he remained generous with his opinions and thoughtful in his assessments. He was a member of the Society of Dilettanti, served on several trusts, boards and committees, and enjoyed visiting churches to explore their monuments, sculptures and art. Meanwhile, the two halves of the Canaletto that he had for so long wanted to see side by side were finally reunited in 2018 for an exhibition in Rome.
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Laing had an enormous capacity for learning and a great memory, though he insisted there was never enough time to read and absorb everything. Recently he was handed a couple of tiny pieces from a jigsaw puzzle of a Titian painting. He was immediately able to identify the painting from which they came.
Alastair Laing, curator of pictures and sculptures for the National Trust 1986-2013, was born on August 5, 1944. He died from an infection on June 29, 2024, aged 79