Audrey Baker
The following tribute to Audrey Baker appeared in SALON on 10 October 2011:
Our Fellow Audrey Baker has also died, at the great age of 103 and just a
week before her book on English Panel Paintings rolled off the press
(about which, see more below). Audrey’s editor, Ann Ballantyne, has provided
this short account of Audrey’s life.
‘Audrey was born in Oxford on 11 January 1908, the second child of the
chemists Muriel and Herbert Brereton Baker CBE FRS. She was educated at
Berkhamsted School for Girls (as a boarder) and then St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
She initially read chemistry but, to her parents’ disappointment, decided to
transfer to the History Department where she did a degree in Modern History.
Audrey then studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she
received her doctorate in 1937.
‘Her PhD thesis, on “The rood screens of East Anglia and Devon”, reflected
her fascination with mediaeval iconography and its influences, particularly as
used in England on wall paintings and rood screens. At a time when research of
this kind was in its infancy, she visited and studied in virtually every major
library, art gallery and museum in Europe, in her hunt for story and image
sources. Part of her research was published in 2004 as ‘Representations of
Sibyls on rood screens in Devon’ (The Devonshire Association for the Advancement
of Science, Literature and the Arts, Volume 136), while the rest of her life’s
work has just been published by Archetype Publications, entitled English
Panel Paintings 1400—1558: a survey of figure paintings on East Anglian rood
screens, by Audrey M Baker, edited and extended by Ann Ballantyne and
Pauline Plummer (ISBN 9781904982692).
‘When her father became Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College in 1912,
the family moved to Latchmoor House, in Gerrards Cross, then little more than a
village. Her father died in 1935. During the war, Audrey not only looked after
her sick mother but also taught at High Wycombe Grammar School. Following her
mother’s death in 1944, Audrey adopted two children, Peter and Tom, who kept her
very busy but, with the help of a part-time nanny, she managed to continue her
research on one day a week, usually at the Warburg or the Courtauld Institute,
the Society of Antiquaries or the British Library, and to drive Dr E Clive Rouse
to a remote church to study the iconography of a (frequently newly discovered)
wall painting. These excursions often resulted in the joint publication of
in-depth articles in the Archaeological Journal, Archaeologia or a
local historical or archaeological society journal. One result of all her
research was that she became an invaluable resource in her own right, frequently
consulted by conservators dealing with wall and panel paintings and always very
generous with her knowledge as well as kind and encouraging to any young people
who showed an interest in the subject.
‘In 1957 Audrey and the Revd Geoffrey Edmonds co-founded the Chalfont St
Peter and Gerrards Cross History Society, of which Audrey was President until
the time of her death, and in 2003 (aged ninety-five) she published her
History of Bulstrode, the former home of Judge Jeffreys, the Dukes of
Portland and the Dukes of Somerset in a volume that also included Geoffrey
Edmonds’s History of Chalfont St Peter and Gerrards Cross (Colin Smythe
Ltd, 2003).’
Copies of Audrey’s book on English Panel Paintings can be obtained at the pre-publication discount price of £35 plus £5 postage if ordered before 24 November 2011 (down from £45). Order forms for the book can be found in the Society’s Library, or you can send an email to Archetype Publications.
An obituary can also be found in The Guardian.