John Lowden
West 1966-70
John joined West House in 1966, the second of four brothers at The Leys. He excelled both academically and in sport. He was an outstanding cross-country runner and also soon got heavily involved in Scout activities, becoming a hill-walker and climber on many scout camps, expeditions abroad, and alpine climbing. He also sailed dinghies and his brother Stephen recalls that they both sailed a Firefly on Loch Assynt at one camp. In 1970 he left to go up to Emmanuel College Cambridge to read English, following his elder brother, Stephen. He competed at 1500 metres in University Athletics, and was Eastern Counties Junior Cross-Country Champion.
After Cambridge, John went on to do a PhD (1980) at The Courtauld, where he started to specialise in early Christian and Byzantine Art. He had a temporary appointment in Art History at St Andrews, before returning to join the academic staff of The Courtauld in 1982, where he continued to teach until his retirement in 2017. The Making of the Bibles Moralisées was awarded the 2002 Gruendler Prize for the best book in medieval studies that year. His Early Christian and Byzantine Art is a standard work which has been translated into French, Greek, Japanese and Korean. He was a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow (1992-93), and he gave the Grinfield Lectures in the University of Oxford (1996-98). He was elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2006 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2013. In 2011-12 he was co-curator of the major British Library Exhibition ‘Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination’. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College in 2011. Sadly, no sooner was John appointed Professor of Art History at The Courtauld than he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, of which he died earlier this year. He leaves his widow, Professor Joanna Cannon, and a son. His daughter predeceased him.
John was a major part of my life. Along with Richard Armstrong we did so many wonderful things together. We climbed in the Alps and the Pyrenees (at least they did whilst I stayed at lower levels birding and butterflying); we drove to Russia together in 1971; we walked in the hills of North Wales, The Lakes and, of course, in the incomparable North West Highlands. We even acted together at The Leys, neither of us with great distinction I seem to recall. And he gave me a tribute when I retired from teaching in 2005. How shall I remember him? Raising the Union Jack high on the rocks above the campsite at Les Rosiers; on the beach in western Turkey negotiating with local fishermen for some of their catch, which we fried on a wood fire; running from Cambridge to Huntingdon to join us for supper at The Bridge Hotel, where we were refused entry for not wearing ties; fording the river between Culbeg and Suilven with Bill Corke and me (Derek Baker had assured us that there was a bridge); awarding the Culmore Cap (origins lost in the mists of time). I am proud to have known him.
Words by John Harding and the Lowden family