This surprisingly rare ability will be remembered with gratitude by a generation of his students, now widely spread throughout the art world. Self-taught, he was totally non-academic (indeed, anti-academic) but through his years at the Victoria and Albert Museum he had developed a sure knowledge and a passionate love for works of art over a wide range. With his forcefully argued and often strikingly original views on art, he could move with ease through an extensive visual landscape, pointing out highlights and connecting nuances of influence and style. Although his main experience was with furniture and decoration, he was at home with a myriad of different subjects, from Chinese painting of the seventeenth century to Dutch landscapes, from Impressionism through to contemporary art, from the ancient world to the Renaissance, from television to pop art, from cinema to music to rococo decoration. His provocative and challenging views, complete with a long series of special loves and hates, were derived from an extraordinary ability to look at and judge works of art. Unimpressed by rarity "patina" or provenance, he was able to analyse the intrinsic quality of works of art and the key to his success as a teacher lay in his skill in communicating this, in particular through his beautifully prepared and marvellously concise lectures.
In 1970 Shrub went from the Victoria and Albert Museum's Education Department (he had started his career at the Museum in the late 1950s in the Furniture and Woodwork department) to start the Training Scheme at Sotheby's. It was a surprising move for both Shrub and Sothe-by's, an inspired choice made possible by the optimism of a rapidly expanding auction market and by the auction house's desire to attempt to create a properly and widely trained staff of experts. Shrub remained at Sotheby's for seventeen years. It was not always easy to resolve the conflict of interests that sometimes ensued, but with his forceful character and determination to avoid compromise, Shrub made a remarkable success of it, at times against considerable odds. It was soon copied by Christie's, and the scheme grew in answer to enormous demand.
For his large and close circle of friends he was a magnetic figure and his death will be a sad loss. He could be dictatorial, dogmatic and occasionally harsh, but he usually had very good reasons, detesting indifference, pomposity and tediousness, and was often so funny in his criticisms that in any case it was difficult not to go along with him. But underlying this sometimes fierce exterior, he was loyal, stimulating and unsentimental, and very sensitive to others' problems; he was a good judge of character and had a striking ability to bring out latent talent. Along with food and wine, he loved music and films, all consumed with an intensely personal appreciation. Physically, he was a mixture of the young Mickey Rooney with dashes of Cagney. His remarkable wit was as smart as the dialogue of Myrna Loy and William Powell and, Hollywood style, he usually had the right punch line at his com-mand. But Shrub was always himself, above life enhancing and delightfully funny.
Derek Shrub, born 8 April 1933, died on 30 August 1995.