Art historian and biographer, her work infused large, iconic subjects with new life
Carola Hicks, who has died of cancer aged 68, was a glamorous academic and a serious populariser of art. She created something new in the world of contemporary biography, writing the life stories and afterlives of iconic works of art such as the Bayeux tapestry and the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. She swept the dust off old masterpieces, explained their cultural contexts and infused them with life for a new public.
Her first book to reach a wide general audience was the acclaimed Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk (2001), a gripping account of an 18th-century aristocrat, an earlier Lady Diana Spencer. This Lady Di defied convention: she abandoned her husband, the second Viscount Bolingbroke, for a secret liaison with Topham Beauclerk, concealed her illegitimate child, divorced, remarried and earned her living by becoming an accomplished painter. Carola's biography illuminated 18th-century artistic life and exposed the consequences of transgressive behaviour by women.
Her next book, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (2006), was the first of her innovative biographies of works of art. Carola brought fresh insights to this medieval strip cartoon and instrument of political propaganda. Most groundbreaking was her investigation of the afterlife of the Bayeux tapestry: its rediscovery by 18th-century antiquarians, its survival though the French revolution, its reinvention by the pre-Raphaelites, its skewed interpretation by over-reachers from Napoleon to Heinrich Himmler.
She followed this success with The King's Glass: A Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art (2007), which Radio 4 serialised as its Christmas book of the week. As Henry VIII's queens disappeared, they were erased from the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel. When he replaced orthodox Catholicism with his own Supremacy and Reformation, the glass was adapted to reflect this, too. The magisterial images were made by immigrant craftsmen handling tiny pieces of luminous glass. 'This book is in part a hymn to their light, with glass of beryl and amethyst, sapphire and emerald … in miniature the story of the nation,' Peter Ackroyd wrote of it.
Born in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, Carola was the daughter of actors, David Brown and Margaret Gibson. After her father died on active service in North Africa in 1943, Carola was brought up by her mother, who continued her stage career. Carola was educated at the Lady Eleanor Holles school at Hampton, Middlesex, and then at Edinburgh University, where in 1964 she took a first in archaeology, and was one of the stars of the department.
True to her thespian inheritance, she played Olivia in Twelfth Night on a student tour of the Highlands and Islands. During one exploit, she and fellow actors constructed a Loch Ness monster out of hessian, wire and newspaper and faked a sighting, reported in the national press. After acting in repertory and television, Carola returned to Edinburgh and gained her PhD, in 1967, on 'the animal style in English Romanesque art'.
She worked on Reader's Digest and Woman's Own and for the Council for British Archaeology before becoming a researcher in the House of Commons library. Carola said you could always tell what MPs were really like by the way they treated their staff. She met her future husband, the lobby journalist and now fellow author, Gary Hicks, in the Strangers' Bar. They married in 1969.
She worked at the British Museum on the account of the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, whose three volumes were published in 1975, 1978 and 1983, before becoming a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, in 1978 and writing her first book, Animals in Early Medieval Art (1993). For several years from 1984 she was curator of the Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral. She became a fellow and director of studies in art history at Newnham College, Cambridge, where for more than 20 years she taught as she wrote, in a lively, accessible style that combined erudition with enthusiasm.
A keen gardener, amateur photographer, ice-skater and botanic drawing student, with a lifelong love of theatre, Carola was witty and irreverent, wrote wickedly funny articles for the Literary Review, and especially enjoyed Biographers' Club events. Days before her death she had almost completed Girl in a Green Gown, a 'biography' of Jan van Eyck's enigmatic portrait The Arnolfini Marriage.
Six months ago, Carola was diagnosed with cancer, which she faced with clear-eyed dispassion. She died at home, stylish to the last, with a red rose from the garden on her pillow. She is survived by Gary and their children, Colette and Toby.
• Carola Margaret Hicks, art historian and author, born 7 November 1941; died 23 June 2010"
I don't know anything about her, and not much about art history, but hers seemed a rich and lively life, the obituary sprinkled with many a telling detail. The juiciest (and the one that prompted me to star this) is the red rose.
I'd love to read her book on the Bayreux tapestries.
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