My friend Anne Goodchild, who has died aged 77, was an art historian who rose to become senior curator of the Graves art gallery in Sheffield, where she had started as a researcher back in the early 1970s. She retired in 2007, just before the introduction of legislation that would have enabled her to continue in the post she loved so much.
I met Anne in 1976 when she organised a touring exhibition of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, part of a series of shows for Sheffield City art galleries devoted to 19th- and early 20th-century artists in need of intelligent re-evaluation. JW Waterhouse, William Strang and Gerald Brockhurst followed, among many other exhibitions and scholarly displays.
In a later existence as a freelancer, Anne supported artists as a trustee to S1 Artspace, published Dear Winifred (2013), Christopher Wood’s letters to Winifred and Ben Nicholson, and organised several touring exhibitions, often with handsome accompanying publications. A show of the Camden Town group was followed by a major study of Victor Pasmore, a bravura survey of British abstraction, The Expressive Mark, and an elegant reappraisal of Ivon Hitchens. She was busily working on a new interpretation of Barbara Hepworth before her death.
Anne lived for most of her life in the Sheffield suburb of Broomhill, John Betjeman’s “prettiest suburb in England”. An enthusiastic cinemagoer, she was also an avid traveller, always stylishly dressed, striking as any Brockhurst portrait, and happiest taking a train towards a new escapade; with a glass in hand after tracking down a building by Le Corbusier; entertaining friends with exuberant anecdotes over a bottle of wine; or sending postcards in her fine italic hand. She was my regular, ideal flat-sitter in Marylebone, central London, where she maintained her childhood and art world connections.
Born in Ilford, Essex, Anne was the only child of Marjorie (nee Lincoln), a housewife, and Rupert Goodchild. Her father worked for the Forestry Commission, and she went to Prebendal House school in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and then Aylesbury high school.
Outings to London with her mother were always via Marylebone, often to the Wallace Collection. She developed her passion for art at school, then Amersham College of Art and the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. She subsequently studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art from 1968 to 1971, during which time she lived with a family in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. She loved London all her life.
Anne worked harder at friendships than anyone I know. One of her excellent exhibitions was The Absent Presence and her many friends will feel that deeply.
