Sir Oliver Millar; Telegraph (Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures)
Hyfler/Rosner
Telegraph 14/05/2007
Sir Oliver Millar, who died on May 10 aged 84, devoted
more than 40 years to the care and the cataloguing of
paintings in the Royal Collection, latterly as Surveyor of
the Queen's Pictures and Director of the Royal Collection;
he was also one of the world's leading authorities on the
painter Anthony van Dyck.
The Surveyorship is unlike any other curatorial post
in England: the pictures hang on the walls of the royal
palaces and residences, not in museums; and the holder of
the post is a courtier. Kenneth Clark, who was appointed
Surveyor by King George V, considered the ideal candidate to
be a good scholar, a pleasant companion and a firm upholder
of the monarchy.
Millar, who joined the Royal Collection as the first
full-time Assistant Surveyor in 1947, was all of these. That
he was also efficient and possessed a discriminating eye
qualified him for rapid promotion, after two years, to
Deputy Surveyor, in an era when the Surveyorship itself,
then held by Anthony Blunt, was still a part-time post.
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Diligent, too, while seeing to the day-to-day care and
supervision of 5,000 or so paintings, principally at
Windsor, Hampton Court and in London, during his time as
Deputy (1949-72) Millar still found time to co-write English
Art, 1625-1714 (1957), to produce works touching on
Gainsborough, Rubens, Dobson and Zoffany, and to publish
catalogues of the Tudor, Stuart and Georgian pictures in the
Royal Collection.
"This is a splendid opening volume," wrote the
historian CV Wedgwood on publication of the first of the
series of Royal Collection catalogues in 1963. "Meticulous
scholarship, combined with an imaginative grasp of history,
enable Mr Oliver Millar to illuminate the social, political
and the aesthetic aspects of two centuries." Millar's
admirable second volume was published in 1969 - and his
meticulous Inventories and Valuations of the King's Goods,
relating to King Charles I, in 1972.
On succeeding Blunt as Surveyor that year, and working
with only a secretary, Millar became responsible for the
preservation and display of paintings in eight Royal
residences. He might have to re-hang a picture in one of the
Queen's private apartments, to supervise the cleaning and
display of an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, to arrange
the loan of a painting to an exhibition overseas, to reply
to a scholarly inquiry or to attend a banquet.
One of the most significant developments of his tenure
as Surveyor came with the appointment, in 1981, of the
Collection's first full-time picture restorer - an
appointment made in the wake of criticism that some of the
Queen's pictures looked as if they had been "got at by a
militant daily with a Brillo pad".
With less time for writing, Millar none the less
produced The Queen's Pictures (1977), the first detailed
account of the Royal Collection for the general reader. He
also wrote the catalogues - intelligent and perceptive - for
the National Portrait Gallery's exhibitions Sir Peter Lely
(1978), the first to be devoted entirely to Lely's work, and
Van Dyck in England (1982), the first major exhibition of
van Dyck's work to be held in London.
As Director of the Royal Collection in 1987-88, Millar
became responsible for co-ordinating the activities of the
Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures with those of the Surveyor
of the Queen's Works of Art and the Queen's Librarian. On
his retirement in 1988 - prior to which the post of Surveyor
had been advertised (in the pages of the Burlington
Magazine) for the first time - he was appointed Surveyor
Emeritus.
Oliver Nicholas Millar was born on April 26 1923, the
elder son of Gerald Millar, MC and his wife Ruth. He was
educated at Rugby and at the Courtauld Institute of Art,
London University, which he left with an Academic Diploma in
the History of Art.
One of his teachers at the Courtauld was Anthony
Blunt, the Institute's director, and after Blunt had
succeeded Kenneth Clark as Surveyor of the King's Pictures
in 1945, Millar got in touch with him, "rather cheekily"
asked for a job, and soon afterwards became Blunt's
assistant. All went well, and on the departure of the Deputy
Surveyor, Benedict Nicolson, in 1949, Millar took Nicolson's
place.
As his knowledge of the Royal Collection and of its
history grew over the years, Millar made some interesting
discoveries. In 1964, for instance, he identified two
paintings that surfaced at sales - one by Pieter Brueghel
the Elder, the other by the miniaturist Peter Oliver - as
works that had disappeared from the Collection in the 17th
and 18th centuries.
His knowledge of the Collection during the reign of
Charles I came to be unrivalled (he wrote the catalogue for
the exhibition The Age of Charles I at the Tate Gallery in
1972) as also, over several decades, did his knowledge of
van Dyck's English period paintings.
In 1953 it was Millar who chose the 37 works by van
Dyck (including seven belonging to the Queen) that formed
the core of the winter exhibition of Flemish art at the
Royal Academy; 30 years later it was Millar who selected the
65 paintings and 22 drawings for Van Dyck in England at the
National Portrait Gallery; and it was Millar who contributed
the section on van Dyck's English period to Van Dyck, A
Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (2004).
Nor was his connoisseurship confined to Anthony van
Dyck. In 1966, for example, he identified a previously
unrecognised early painting by Rubens, The Judgment of
Paris, that came up for sale at Christie's in London, and
his attribution was supported by Michael Jaffé and other
Rubens scholars.
At home in the 19th century, too, Millar produced two
volumes (one a meticulous catalogue raisonné, the other
containing nearly 900 plates) of The Victorian Pictures in
the Collection of HM the Queen (1992). He wrote articles for
the Burlington Magazine and other learned art historical
journals, and numerous catalogues, principally for the
Queen's Gallery.
Beyond the Royal Collection he held various important,
voluntary appointments, some of them for many years. He was
a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 1972 to
1995; a member of the Reviewing Committee on Export of Works
of Art from 1975 to 1987; and a member of the executive
committee of the National Art Collections Fund from 1986 to
1998. He was Visitor at the Ashmolean Museum, from 1987 to
1993; and a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund
from 1988 to 1992.
He was advanced through the ranks of the Royal
Victorian Order from MVO in 1953 to GCVO in 1988. He was
elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1970. In his
spare time he enjoyed drawing, reading, listening to music
and, later in life, his grandchildren.
Oliver Millar married, in 1954, Delia Dawnay, daughter
of Lt-Col Cuthbert Dawnay, MC; they had a son and three
daughters. Lady Millar died in 2004.