sadley Miss Anne Mary Buck died 12th May 2005

14th May 1910-12th May 2005

Miss Buck sent this for Stella's Memorial Celebrations 2001

click here to return to Stella's memory page

STELLA

I first met Stella in the late 1940s and had then known her as a lecturer during the war years when she traveled to speak to audiences all over the country, often on the history of dress. She was giving a lecture then at the City Art Gallery on eighteenth century dress. I had in 1947 been appointed keeper of Costume there after the city had brought Dr. Cunnington’s large collection of woman’s clothing, mainly nineteenth century, Together with Manchester’s existing, but smaller, collection of dress this was now housed in the eighteenth century Platt Hall, reopened in 1947 as The Gallery of English Costume. Stella was just beginning her studies of dress for the National Gallery.

My first impression of her that of her that evening was of elegance, elegance of person and the elegance of a thoughtful, well shaped lecture clearly delivered. Then as I got to know her better discovered her aim of getting the history of dress, acknowledged as a subject of academic study with the establishment of a postgraduate course for it at a university. I realised that as wall as the elegance there wan a quiet but steely determination then within a few years, in 1965, a post graduate course on the history of dress is established at the Courtauld Institute of Art

Stella had then published a study of dress in the paintings of Tintoretto an appendix to her husband, Eric Newton’ s bock on the artist and had worked at the National Gallery, providing a commentary on dress for the catalogues of paintings published between 1952 and 1960. Dress in paintings had now been established in the field of art history and Stella, at an age when most people a think of retirement began a new career in a new university study as its lecturer. She brought more to it than her work in art history, the studies at National Gallery. She brought the practical experience of a career in the theatre, as actress and then maker and designer for the stage, followed by work as a creative dressmaker, with a shop in Bond Street. All this gave her a much wider under standing of dress than could have come from her work on paintings alone.

She was aware too that garments, which have survived are primary evidence of its history and of the need for skills to interpret and r preserve them. Even before she actually embarked on the Courtauld course she attended a conference in Delft were scientists were presenting new techniques to museum conservators and curators.

A year or two into the course and she was co-operating with Karen Finch, another pioneer in the setting up of a textile course. This course was established at Hampton Court and it is now a department of Southampton University hosed on the Winchester campus

Stella ran her small department with skill and judgment. She had been careful to select students who would have a different approaches to the study to the study and was shrewd in her assessment it of personal qualities and possibilities. Long after her students had finished their course she continued to help and advise. It is significant that where her book, Health, Art and Reason was published (1974) its dust jacket advertised a book by one of the first students, Elizabeth Birbari, Dress in Italy, 1460-1520. Health, Art and Reason, a study of dissent in dress in nineteenth century England has always seemed to the wisest and wittiest of Stella’s writings with more of Stella in it than in the rest of her books.

I was glad that she always had friendship and support for Platt Hall and was delighted that she gave the Gallery the dress she had worn for her portrait by Jan de Botton and the suit she had made and worn for her wedding to Eric Newton in 1934. Her roots though were in Manchester although she had left it for London and the stage in 1916

This varied career placed her at the center of a web of many different interests and after she retired from the Courtauld she continued to lecture on aspects of dress to many different audiences. A lecture, which she gave at the London church of St Magnus the Martyr on The First Three Plays of T. S. Eliot, Designs for Settings and Costumes, was published in Costume Vol. 24 (1990). Here she describes her early work in the theatre designing and making clothes 1930-1932 worn, in the settings of George Sheringham, which was the prelude to her dressing of the three Eliot works, The Rock, Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, and the work which followed. Her travels in Hungary led to a new interest the folk dress and textiles which she had seen there, a way of dress quite different from that of Western European but she brought to this the same seeing eye and discussed it with the same freshness of approach as she had done with the dress of the Italian Renaissance.

But it was there she returned for her last book, Dress of the Venetians l495 –1525. This is hardly surprising for she was rather a Renaissance woman herself.

Anne Buck