Geoffrey Webb

Geoffrey Fairbank Webb (1898–1970) was a British art historian, Slade Professor of Fine Art and head of the Monuments and Fine Arts section of the Allied Control Commission during World War II.

For other people named Geoffrey Webb, see Geoffrey Webb (disambiguation).

Early life

Webb was born at Birkenhead, the son of John Racker Webb and his wife Elizabeth Hodgson Fairbank. He was educated at Birkenhead School and in 1917 volunteered to join the Royal Navy. He went to Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1919 where he read English, and graduated in 1921. When he moved to London, he met members of the Bloomsbury group, including Roger Fry.

Career

Webb started to write articles on art for the Burlington Magazine. In 1929 he started lecturing at Cambridge and also became a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1934. In 1938 he became Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge.

When World War II broke out, he joined the Navy again, working for Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty. He was then in the historical section of the War Cabinet Office and joined the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom with Bronze Palm in 1947 and a CBE in the 1953 Coronation Honours.

He resumed the Slade professorship in 1948, and then became secretary to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. He was also a member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1957. In 1956 he wrote a volume on medieval British architecture for the Pelican History of Art.

Personal life

In 1934 he married Marjorie Isabel Batten.

Webb retired to Solva, Pembrokeshire and died at Ffynone, Swansea.

Publications
  • The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh. 4 vols. with Bonamy Dobrée, The Nonesuch Press, 1927–1928
  • "Architecture and sculpture" in Roger Fry Georgian Art (1760–1820), B. T. Batsford, 1929
  • The Letters and Drawings of Nicholas Hawksmoor Relating to the Building of the Mausoleum at Castle Howard, 1726–1742, Walpole Society 17 (1929)
  • Gothic Architecture in England, British Council/Longmans, Green, 1951
  • Baroque Art: Annual Lecture on Aspects of Art, Henriette Hertz Trust, 1947. British Academy, 1951
  • Architecture in Britain: the Middle Ages, (Pelican History of Art 12), Penguin Books, 1956
gollark: Oh, and it's not a special case as much as just annoying, but it's a compile error to not use a variable or import. Which I would find reasonable as a linter rule, but it makes quickly editing and testing bits of code more annoying.
gollark: As well as having special casing for stuff, it often is just pointlessly hostile to abstracting anything:- lol no generics- you literally cannot define a well-typed `min`/`max` function (like Lua has). Unless you do something weird like... implement an interface for that on all the builtin number types, and I don't know if it would let you do that.- no map/filter/reduce stuff- `if err != nil { return err }`- the recommended way to map over an array in parallel, if I remember right, is to run a goroutine for every element which does whatever task you want then adds the result to a shared "output" array, and use a WaitGroup thingy to wait for all the goroutines. This is a lot of boilerplate.
gollark: It also does have the whole "anything which implements the right functions implements an interface" thing, which seems very horrible to me as a random change somewhere could cause compile errors with no good explanation.
gollark: - `make`/`new` are basically magic- `range` is magic too - what it does depends on the number of return values you use, or something. Also, IIRC user-defined types can't implement it- Generics are available for all of, what, three builtin types? Maps, slices and channels, if I remember right.- `select` also only works with the built-in channels- Constants: they can only be something like four types, and what even is `iota` doing- The multiple return values can't be used as tuples or anything. You can, as far as I'm aware, only return two (or, well, more than one) things at once, or bind two returns to two variables, nothing else.- no operator overloading- it *kind of* has exceptions (panic/recover), presumably because they realized not having any would be very annoying, but they're not very usable- whether reading from a channel is blocking also depends how many return values you use because of course
gollark: What, you mean no it doesn't have weird special cases everywhere?

References
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