Hugh Honour

Hugh Honour FRSL (born 26 September 1927) is a British art historian, well known for his writing partnership with John Fleming. Their A World History of Art, is now in its seventh edition and Honour's Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (1961) first set the phenomenon of chinoiserie in its European cultural context.

Early life

Honour was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, to Herbert and Dorothy (Withers) Honour. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from St Catharine's College, Cambridge.[1] While at Cambridge, Honour met John Fleming, a solicitor and amateur art historian, who would become Honour's life partner. Honour accepted a position as Assistant director of Leeds City Art Gallery and Temple Newsam House but left after one year to join Fleming in Italy.

Life in Italy

Living in Asolo near Venice, Honour and Fleming began a highly-productive writing and publishing partnership, in which Fleming managed the business side of their enterprise and Honour wrote the books. They were commissioned by publisher Allen Lane to edit the Style and Civilisation series (begun 1967), which was published by Penguin Books. Under Honour's editorial guidance, the Style and Civilisation series published in quick succession a group of texts that have attained the status of classics, including John Shearman's Mannerism, George Henderson's Gothic, and Linda Nochlin's Realism. Honour's contribution, the highly regarded Neo-Classicism (1968), single-handedly resuscitated the scholarly reputation of the period, which been despised or ignored during the modernist ascendancy.

Despite its high-quality however, the series did not find its audience immediately and was discontinued after only 8 titles. Romanticism, Honour's companion to Neo-Classicism, was published in 1979, long after the demise of the series.

Honour and Fleming also supervised the Architect and Society series (begun 1966); and the Art in Context series (begun 1972) for Penguin.[2] In 1966, they revised and completed Nikolaus Pevsner's The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture (2nd edition 1972), and in 1977 they published The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts. The indefatigable couple published "The Visual Arts: A History," in 1982, the first survey of global art history, including Western, Asian, African, Pre-Columbian and Native American art appeared" in 1982 and is now in its 7th edition. Honour published Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler and Sargent in 1991 and edited the written works of Antonio Canova (1994).

In 1962, Honour and Fleming moved to Villa Marchiò outside of Lucca (a city favored by British expatriates), where they lived together until Fleming's death in 2001 and where Honour acontinues to reside. Honour was elected in 1972 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature [3]

Selected publications

Books
Articles

References and sources

References
  1. ↑ Gale.
  2. ↑ Honour, Hugh Dictionary of Art Historians, 2013. Retrieved 28 September 2013. Archived here.
  3. ↑ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 9 August 2010.
Sources
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