John Hayes; National Portrait Gallery head & expert on Gainsborough
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 04/01/2006) Telegraph
John Hayes, who died on Christmas Day aged 76, was Director
of the National Portrait Gallery from 1974 to 1994 and the
leading authority on Thomas Gainsborough.
Where his predecessor at the NPG, Roy Strong, had been
interested in the gallery as an instrument of public
history, Hayes was more engaged by portraiture as an art
form and devoted particular effort to acquisitions, helped
by a relatively generous purchase grant (£310,000 in 1982)
and by his friends - including Sir Hugh Leggatt and John
Baskett - in the trade.
It is perhaps not surprising, given his historical
interests, that Hayes's greatest acquisitions were in the
18th century, including portrait busts of Lord Chesterfield
by Roubiliac (acquired in competition with the V&A), of
Alexander Pope by Rysbrack, and of Pitt the Elder by Joseph
Wilton.
In 1979 the NPG opened its 18th-century outstation at
Beningbrough Hall, Yorkshire, and in the same year extended
its collecting policy to allow commissions, which enabled
Hayes to commission portraits of Prince Philip, the Prince
of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer, just before her marriage -
all by Bryan Organ.
In 1980 his interest in contemporary portraiture was also
evident in the inauguration of an annual Portrait Award,
originally sponsored by John Player, later by BP. These
innovations in the NPG's programme enabled it to play an
important role in the revival of portraiture during the
1980s, and Hayes enjoyed being able to nurture the careers
of young artists, including the late Sarah Raphael.
During the 1980s, as well as opening Bodelwyddan as an
outstation for Victorian portraits in north Wales, Hayes was
much occupied by efforts to relocate the NPG to new
premises, as he had the Museum of London.
First it was going to the South Bank, then to Canary Wharf,
encouraged by the fact that Roy Strong was acting as adviser
to the developers and the Prime Minister wanted to use the
existing NPG to house the Thyssen collection.
When this venture was scuppered by the Trustees, who did not
want the Gallery to move from its location close to
Whitehall, Hayes concentrated instead on a grand development
of the gallery to the north of Orange Street, designed by
Alan Stanton and Paul Williams.
When this proved too expensive, he switched to a more
modest, but still ambitious development, launched by
Margaret Thatcher in 1989, of new 20th-century galleries and
the Wolfson exhibition gallery, designed by John Miller, in
the ground floor of the existing building; there was also
the new staff accommodation, including the Heinz Library, in
premises to the north of Orange Street. These opened in
November 1993, shortly before Hayes's retirement in early
1994.
Essentially shy and not given to blowing his own trumpet (it
was said that he would go to any lengths to avoid meeting
his staff), Hayes's achievement in protecting the identity
of the NPG in difficult years has been underappreciated.
He was especially proud of having helped to establish in
situ arrangements for the acceptance-in-lieu of portraits at
Arundel Castle and of ensuring the appointment of
"not-too-Tory" Trustees, including the late Brian Morris,
whom he had heard talk on Radio 3.
His advice to his successor was to pay close attention to
placement on formal occasions (this was a metaphor for his
approach to management), to delegate as much as possible, to
distrust all offers of help from civil servants, and to join
the Beefsteak Club.
John Trevor Hayes was born on January 21 1929. One of two
brothers, he was educated at Ardingly and Keble College,
Oxford, where he read Modern History. He went on to do
postgraduate research at the Courtauld Institute, an
institution to which he was devoted, and in 1954 was
appointed an assistant keeper at the London Museum, then
based at Kensington Palace.
Four years later he went on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship
to study at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. He
remained fond of the United States, and had many friends on
the other side of the Atlantic, particularly Robert Wark,
the scholar of British art at the Huntington Library.
The first manifestation of Hayes's lifelong interest in the
work of Gainsborough was an exhibition for the Arts Council
in 1960 and, in 1962, he was awarded a PhD for his work on
the artist's landscape paintings. Throughout the 1960s Hayes
worked hard building the collections of the London Museum
(he published the catalogue of oil paintings in 1970),
organising exhibitions, re-displaying the State Apartments,
and publishing widely, including a book on London since 1912
and on Gainsborough's drawings. In 1970 he was appointed
Director.
His years as Director at the London Museum were not easy
because of its proposed amalgamation with the Guildhall
Museum and the plans to move to new quarters on London Wall
designed by Powell and Moya.
But he was much liked by his staff, increased visitor
numbers by 30 per cent, recruited younger staff, established
a modern department under Colin Sorensen, and held lively
exhibitions on London in the 1930s and the work of Mary
Quant. In 1973 he was photographed by Arnold Newman looking
unexpectedly beat.
In 1974, when Hayes failed to be appointed Director of the
new Museum of London, he instead succeeded his friend, Roy
Strong, as Director of the NPG. If the Trustees, led by Lord
Kenyon, had been sometimes wary of Strong's flamboyance,
they found the perfect foil in Hayes's low key, wilfully
modest conscientiousness.
All the time that he was Director, Hayes kept up his
scholarly pursuits, not always with the Trustees' approval.
He was responsible, in 1977, for an exhibition of the work
of Graham Sutherland, an artist whose work he greatly
admired, and, in 1980, for the great Gainsborough exhibition
at the Tate and Grand Palais in Paris.
In 1982 his magnum opus, The Landscape Paintings of Thomas
Gainsborough, was published and, in 1992, to his staff's
amazement, he produced a major scholarly Catalogue of
British Paintings in the National Gallery of Art in
Washington. His retirement was marked by an exhibition which
he himself organised on the work of Thomas Eakins.
John Hayes was appointed CBE in 1986.
He kept up his scholarly activities in retirement, arranging
a Gainsborough exhibition in Ferrara, publishing a new
edition of The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough in 2001, and
acting as vice-president of the Walpole Society.
He never married, but had many friends, loved opera, ballet,
travel and the Garrick Club, and had a cottage in the
country near Newbury, where he took to gardening.