Gerald Grosvenor, the sixth Duke of Westminster, who possessed one of the greatest privately owned collections of Old Masters, died on 9 August, aged 64. The freehold owner of 300 acres in Mayfair and Belgravia, central London, the duke increased his wealth (estimated at £8bn) through his work as a property developer. He assumed responsibility for managing the family estates, including the hereditary seat, Eaton Hall, Chester, at the age of 19. The family collection includes works by artists such as Cranach the Younger, Velázquez, Claude, Rembrandt, Teniers the Younger, Gainsborough and Stubbs, as well as Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud. The collection was mostly assembled by the Earls Grosvenor in the late 18th and early 19th century. Works are regularly loaned for public display at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, an independent gallery, named after Hugh Grosvenor, the first duke of Westminster, who donated the site on which the building was erected in 1888.
Edward Morris died on 29 May, aged 76. As the curator of fine art at the National Museums and Art Galleries on Merseyside from 1966 to 1999, he undertook, in exemplary fashion, the display, cataloguing and publishing of the paintings and sculpture of the Walker Art Gallery, Sudley House and the Lady Lever Art Gallery. His radical redisplay of the sculpture at the Walker in 1988 won a National Art Collections Fund award. His book French Art in 19th-Century Britain (2005) was the fruit of 30 years’ work with these international collections, setting them in their historical context as a rich regional product of industry and trade. His greatest contribution, however, is the series The Public Sculpture of Britain, a collaboration between the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA) and Liverpool University Press. Morris was chair of its editorial board and editor from its inception in 1997 until last year. The 17 volumes to date are now the bedrock of the online venture Your Sculpture, a collaboration of ArtUK (formerly the Public Catalogue Foundation) and the PMSA to record public sculpture in the UK.
Syed Haider Raza, a founding member of the avant-garde Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) who spent most of his career in France, died on 23 July in New Delhi, aged 94. Born in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, he studied art in Nagpur and Mumbai, where he co-founded PAG in 1947, and moved to France in 1950 to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His expressive landscapes evolved into abstraction, and in the 1980s he began to incorporate Indian metaphysics in his geometric work. One of the best-known Indian artists of his generation, he became a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962. He was decorated three times by India between 1980 and 2013, and was named a Commander of the Legion of Honour in France last year.
Philippe Roberts-Jones, the Belgian art historian, professor and senior curator of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, died on 9 August, aged 91. Born in Ixelles to British parents, Roberts-Jones served in the armed forces in the Second World War and then studied the history of art and archaeology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Harvard and the University of Salzburg. In 1959 he joined the staff of the Musées Royaux as a curator, becoming senior curator in 1961 until his retirement in 1984. During his time, he oversaw the renovation of all the museums in the complex as well as 92 exhibitions, most famously Le siècle de Bruegel (1963). At ULB he was the chair of the contemporary art department and was ennobled for his services to art by King Baudouin in 1988.