Duncan Robinson’s posthumous book, Pen and Pencil: Visual and Literary Culture in Georgian England, was launched last night at the Paul Mellon Centre – very appropriately, as it turned out from Brian Allen’s speech, because Duncan had helped save and stabilise the finances of the Paul Mellon Centre when he first became Director of the Yale Center for British Art in 1981.
He had been thinking about the book while he was at Yale and later as Director of the Fitzilliam Museum, but only started writing it after he had retired from Magdalene College, Cambridge in 2012. In fact, I see that nearly my last correspondence with him was about his Introduction in February 2021. He died in December 2022.
After reading English at Cambridge, he went to study early Italian paintings as a Mellon Fellow at Yale, but he must have imbibed a great deal of the intense anglophilia and study of English literary culture which was a characteristic of Yale at the time. Chauncy Brewster Tinker, the author of Painter and Poet: Studies in the Literary Relations of English Painting had died in 1963, but his spirit lived on, not least at the Elizabethan Club which Tinker had helped found.
I am so pleased that Duncan’s book has now been published, beautifully produced by Pallas Athene:-
https://pallasathene.co.uk/shop/pen-and-pencil-visual-and-literary-culture-in-georgian-england
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Pity I missed the book launch (my invite must of got lost in the post😊), but it was thanks to a Mellon event more than thirty years ago, hosted by Brian Allen and attended by Duncan Robinson that Yale acquired their first and perhaps still their only Wyndham Lewis painting. I had recently visited New Haven’s wondrous Yale Center for British Art and enthused about it to Duncan but joshed him about its major lacuna, the absence of anything by our greatest 20th-century author-artist and strongly recommended he acquire the so-called Portrait of John Macleod which I knew was on the market in a Dover Street gallery (having previously belonged to dear friends John and Harriet Cullis). For more gripping detail, see my epic article in the 2016 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies.