At the end of a long and respected career as an art historian, fate was not kind to Ronald Pickvance. In 2016 Pickvance, an expert on Van Gogh’s time in Provence, wrote the foreword to Vincent Van Gogh: the Lost Arles Sketchbook by the Canadian academic Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov. The book revealed the existence of an “unknown” Van Gogh sketchbook containing numerous drawings dating from the painter’s ill-starred stay in the city in 1888-89, which culminated in him taking a razor to his ear.
The sketchbook, from the critical period in Van Gogh’s life, was not, said Pickvance, a normal “sleeper” case, but “the most revolutionary discovery in the history of Van Gogh’s oeuvre”.
Unfortunately for Pickvance and Welsh-Ovcharov (and their publisher) the Van Gogh Museum — the guardian and ultimate arbiter of all things to do with the artist — wasn’t having it. “In our opinion it’s not authentic,” said a representative. A later statement gave a detailed rebuttal and made a further, damaging sideswipe, claiming that the case was not just about the sketchbook: “It is also about the underlying, excessively easygoing attitude taken by Welsh-Ovcharov and by Pickvance to questions of authenticity.”
Pickvance, a man who was not averse to a rumpus, was in no mood to back down: “These [drawings] are absolutely OK,” he said. “End of song, end of story.” Indeed it was the end of the song, but not in the way that he meant. Without the museum’s imprimatur the sketchbook has little chance of ever being accepted as genuine. It has, in effect, been kicked into the art- historical long grass.
This was not the first time that Pickvance had made the news. In 1980, while he was a tenured academic at the University of Glasgow, he wrote a letter of complaint against his employer, which intended to sell off 11 works by Whistler from its collection to help fund the revamping of the Hunterian, the university museum.
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Hawking its patrimony, Pickvance said, would be a dereliction of duty. The paintings had already been shipped to Agnew’s in London for assessment in such secrecy that even the Hunterian’s director was unaware of what was going on. The leaking of the news (attributed by some insiders to Sotheby’s, the jealous underbidder) and Pickvance’s letter brought the sale to public notice and quickly stopped it. Pickvance managed to keep his job.
Born in Bolton in 1930, Ronald Pickvance attended Bolton School from 1941 to 1949, where he developed a life-long love of Lancashire County Cricket Club and Bolton Wanderers. A place at Cambridge to study history (the university did not then offer a degree in art history) followed. It was at Cambridge, where he was taught by JH Plumb, that he met his future wife, Georgina (“Gina”), who was then an au pair for FR and “Queenie” Leavis. Pickvance spent two years at the Courtauld Institute, then worked for the Arts Council from 1957 to 1965.
His academic career took him first to Glasgow, then in 1966 to the University of Nottingham before he returned to Glasgow in 1977 as the Richmond Professor of Fine Art. In 1984 he left academia to become an independent art historian and curator.
By this point he had established a name as an expert on — among others — Degas, Gauguin, Sisley, Van Gogh and Sickert, and as the progenitor of important exhibitions, most notably two Van Gogh shows at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the 1980s.
A gregarious man who liked to be the centre of attention, Pickvance would happily indulge in a bit of showmanship. For a lecture on Degas’ painting L’Absinthe he once propped a bottle of the stuff on the lectern next to him. The maintenance of an impressive beard and a penchant for oversized floppy hats revealed poseur tendencies. While some friends likened him to the Ancient Mariner, others thought that he was trying to ape his heroes, Degas and Sickert.
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The last 20 years of his life were spent in a cottage in Broad Campden in the Cotswolds, surrounded by vertiginous piles of books and papers. After the death of Gina (they had no children) he was largely confined there by agoraphobia and the cataracts that may well have contributed to the disputed attribution of the Van Gogh sketchbook.
Pickvance believed that everything in art history connects, and he truffled seemingly random facts from unlikely sources and niggled away at them until they revealed their relevance. He was also considered a top-notch researcher, whose writings are full of clues about all the things that he intended to follow up.
Ronald Pickvance, art historian, was born on August 15, 1930. He died after a collapse on March 21, 2017, aged 86