Geoffrey Webb

Geoffrey Fairbank Webb CBE (9 May 1898 – 17 July 1970) was a British art historian, Slade Professor of Fine Art and head of the Monuments and Fine Arts section of the Allied Control Commission during World War II.

Early life Webb was born in Birkenhead, to John Racker Webb, who worked at the Booth Steamship Company, and his wife Elizabeth Hodgson Fairbank. Webb was the only child of his father's second marriage. Most of his step-brothers and -sisters were old enough to be his uncles and aunts. His mother died when he was fifteen and his father later married again. His closest ties growing up were with his eldest stepsister and her husband.

He resumed the Slade professorship in 1948, and then became secretary to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. He was also a member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1957. In 1956 he wrote a volume on medieval British architecture for the Pelican History of Art.

Personal life In 1934 he married Marjorie Isabel Batten, an architectural historian who later devoted her career to English eighteenth-century sculpture.

Publications

The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh. 4 vols. with Bonamy Dobrée, The Nonesuch Press, 1927–1928 "Architecture and sculpture" in Roger Fry Georgian Art (1760–1820), B. T. Batsford, 1929 The Letters and Drawings of Nicholas Hawksmoor Relating to the Building of the Mausoleum at Castle Howard, 1726–1742, Walpole Society 17 (1929) Gothic Architecture in England, British Council/Longmans, Green, 1951 Baroque Art: Annual Lecture on Aspects of Art, Henriette Hertz Trust, 1947. British Academy, 1951 Architecture in Britain: the Middle Ages, (Pelican History of Art 12), Penguin Books, 1956