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The Smithsonian InstitutionRegents of the University of Michigan
Laurence BinyonAuthor(s): Basil GraySource: Ars Islamica, Vol. 11/12 (1946), pp. 207-209Published by: Freer Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and Department of the Historyof Art, University of MichiganStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4515641 .
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IN MEMORIAM
LAURENCE BINYON
HE STUDY AND APPRECIATION OF ORIENTAL ART IN THE WEST IS, AFTER ALL, A NEWr THING. Oriental learning found its admirers and interpreters in Europe in the twelfth century and the seventeenth; during the hundred years from I1775 to I875 Eastern poetry and philosophy had a considerable influence on Western thought, especially in Germany, and, a little later, in France. In England they formed a considerable tributary to the main stream of the romantic move- ment. But it was not until after this period was over that oriental art found any deep appreci- ation. This is, of course, not to forget the earlier vogue for chinoiserie, which was a borrowing of motifs from an art whose technical accomplishments in porcelain and lacquer won a salute from that age of taste, without any further significance for the West than the dilution of the hitherto purely classical repertory of ornament. But after the way had been paved by the translation of Eastern poetry, especially Persian and Sanskrit, by the last quarter of the nine- teenth century the West was ready to approach the art of the East with respect. And so, the breaking down of the narrow limits to the range of what good taste would accept in the visual arts fell in with a development which was also widening the range of taste in letters and phi- losophy until the schools of Eastern painting and sculpture could find consideration alongside the medieval, the classical, and the Egyptian; and very soon came the recognition in them of an even greater interest for an age which was in its own way sophisticated, humanistic, and intellectual; or sensuous, romantic, and visionary, just as the arts of the Far and Near East seemed to be.
During a period like this when Eastern art was being approached and studied from a com- pletely new angle, for the first time on the level, there are only two ways of approach, in de- fault of any established criteria: either to accept the East's own standards of values to be found in its critical writing and tradition, or to achieve a widening of taste and judgment until a degree of universality could be reached. Both ways were tried; but it was natural and fortu- nate that the latter had the greater influence. For human nature is seldom found to knit outstanding scholarship with superlative taste; and it might well have taken generations for the work of scholars to make its way into the general circulation of Western thought, whereas, by the alternative method it was possible to go immediately to the heart of the matter.
There is no space here to consider the development from the japonaiserie of the Gon- courts to the present admiration for the strength of form of archaic Chinese bronzes and jades. We must limit ourselves here to the appreciation of Islamic art. Just because it was nearer in space, and never since the Crusades completely strange to Europe, Muhammadan art could not strike with the same freshness as that of China or Japan. It is therefore all the more remark- able that the eye of the West, so long closed to the excellencies of what it had had under its notice, should have been opened. For, although Mogul drawings or Mosul bronzes lhad been found in connoisseurs' collections, they had been regarded as mere tours de force of technical
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208 IN MEMORIAM
skill. A glance through the entries describing the miniatures in the catalogues published dur- ing the nineteenth century by the principal oriental libraries of the West will show at once how patronizing and estranged were these same oriental scholars in art matters. With the turn of the century all that began to change, and public exhibitions of Islamic art found enthusi- astic if not always discriminating critics. Such eblouissement could not last, and the love of sheer color characteristic of art nouveau passed. After I9I4 the romanticism of Pierre Loti no longer colored the general view of the Near East. It was time for serious appraisal.
Even in the first edition of his Painting in the Far East, published in i908, Laurence Binyon included a short chapter on Persia. He for long shared the enthusiasm of the collec- tors of Paris, especially of his friends Victor Goloubew, Raymond Koechlin, and Gaston Migeon, for Persian miniatures; and in London his older and closer friends Charles Ricketts and Shan- non did not neglect this field in framing their remarkable collection. It was therefore in a circle of appreciation that Binyon was writing. And his friendship with Sir Thomas Arnold, professor of Persian at the London School of Oriental Studies, also keenly interested in Italian painting and Christian iconography, gave him an introduction to Persian literary stud- ies. From I920 Binyon was able to make available to students in the British Museum Print Room a selection from the Museum's old collections of Indian and Persian miniatures, and in the summer of I922 he staged in the exhibition gallery of his department a show of these paintings for which he wrote a catalogue. About the same time he published with Arnold his Court Painters of the Grand Moguls, which drew also for its illustrations upon the collections at the Bodleian Library and the India Office, then practically unknown to the public; it con- tained an appreciation of the unique vision of this school, with purity of line and powers of observation of all forms of life, men, animals, and flowers. At a later date he was to return to this period in a tribute to the greatness of spirit of the Emperor Akbar, that strange mixture of action and mysticism, of illiteracy and love of scholarship and art, whose efforts to rise above the racial and religious differences of his empire he viewed so sympathetically in a short but vivid biography.
While the painting of the Far East stirred deeper emotions, Binyon got no keener enjoy- ment than from some Indian and Persian drawings, in whose lyric qualities of line and color he found delight which he was able to communicate in his writings and lectures. The introduc- tions to his publications of the miniatures of the royal Nizami manuscript of I539-43 in the British Museum (I929) and of the Royal Asiatic Society's Timurid Shahuama, which he edited with J. V. S. Wilkinson in I93I, and finally to the volume commemorating the Persian Exhibition of I931 (published in I934), could not have been better as descriptions of the pleasures of Persian painting. His lectures too at this time undoubtedly won much apprecia- tion for an art then very little known, even to art lovers and critics. In his lectures on the art of Asia at Harvard in I933-34 he made his final assessment of the place of the arts of Persia and India in Asia and the world.
A remarkable quality of Binyon's appreciation was the judgment with which he discrimi- nated the superlative from the ordinary, the forced from the true. And his clear insight quali- fied his first view of an art form hitherto unknown to him. His imaginative sympathy and
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IN MEMORIAM 209
sensibility seemed indeed of universal range. It was this which gave sureness of touch to his criticism, and its force was immeasurably enhanced by the rich and expressive language wrhich marked his prose writing no less than his poetry. His was an integrated spirit, and it is there- fore true to think of his contribution to Islamic studies as the work of a poet, a vision illumi- nating and revealing the essence of what he saw and reaching behind it to the spiritual springs of the civilization that produced it. He may in perspective appear the central figure in the period of appreciation of oriental art that has been characteristic of the last fifty years. At the present stage of the expansion of civilization in range and universality, no work is more im- portant than this of interpretation, and upon its quality depends the quality of the civilization which will be handed on.
Laurence Binyon was born on August io, I869, and educated at St. Paul's School, Lon- don, then still under the shadow of the Cathedral, and at Trinity College, Oxford, of which he was scholar in classics, and later honorary fellow. He entered the British Museum in ]:893, and became the first head of the Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings in I9I3; during the last year of his service, before his retirement in I933, he was also Keeper of Prints and Drawings. He visited the United States as a lecturer in 19I2, I9I4, and I926, and for a longer stay, after his retirement, in I933-34; and he made many friendships during ithese visits which he greatly enjoyed. In I929 he was invited to visit Japan, where he delivered a series of lectures in English on "Landscape in English Art and Poetry," which were aftermwards printed; his Norton lectures were published under the title of The Spirit of Man in Asian Art. As a museum man he was outstanding in hanging and arrangement, and the periodic exhibitions in his department, each of which was planned with great care, were among the most popular in the Museum. He was always ready with encouragement and sympathy for the young artist and student, and his reserve covered a sociable nature that had a keen enjoyment of wit as well as of beauty. He traveled with zest, and he had a special affection for France and Italy, where his friends were many. His last journey was to Greece, where in the early months of I94.0 he occupied the Byron Chair of English Letters in the University of Athens. He died on M
