It was my second funeral of the week (actually, today’s was a memorial service).

Clare Gittings, who I knew both at school (briefly) and as a very energetic and charismatic Learning Manager at the National Portrait Gallery from 1989 to when she retired in 2013, died of a stroke just before Christmas. 

As always at funerals, I discovered things about her that I had not known.  I knew she had written a book on Brasses and Brass Rubbing, published in 1970 when she was 16.  I did not know it had sold 40,000 copies.  Then she published her Oxford M.Litt as Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England, a pioneering study of the rituals of death. 

She viewed portraits as a historian, not an art historian, and was admirable at introducing children/students and their teachers to the nature of portraiture, having previously taught in an Essex primary school. 

Here she is in her youth:-