Martin Robertson

Charles Martin Robertson was born in Pangbourne, Berkshire, on 11 September 1911. He was the eldest child of Donald Struan Robertson and Petica Coursolles, . His mother maintained a literary salon; his father was a classicist, who had been appointed as an assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge in the year of Robertson's birth and became the university's Regius Professor of Greek in 1930. While in Athens, he worked on Iron Age material from the excavation of Ithaca. He published a short article in The Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1935, on a skyphos painted by the fifth-century BCE Pan Painter: his father had introduced him to the vase, and both Robertsons had independently identified it as the painter's handiwork. ==Academic career==

Robertson unsuccessfully applied to be made a fellow of Trinity in 1936: he was required to submit written work in support of his application, and did so on the material from Ithaca, but his examiner mistakenly sent Robertson's file to the Oxford art historian John Beazley, who was supporting Dale Trendall's competing application. Robertson instead took a post in September 1936 as Assistant Keeper in the Greek and Roman department of the British Museum, cataloguing the pottery from the excavations at Al-Mina in Syria led by Leonard Woolley in 1936–1937. Three members of staff left the museum's employment as a result; Robertson was not involved, and so kept his job (leaving him as the only member of the department). He was, however, demoted in seniority. As a consequence of the departures, Denys Haynes was recruited as an Assistant Keeper, and the art historian Bernard Ashmole, the Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London, was brought in on a part-time basis to run the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Haynes and Robertson became lifelong friends, and Robertson later wrote of the "precious apprenticeship" he gained from working with Ashmole. He resigned in 1948 to succeed Ashmole as Yates Professor at UCL. During his tenure in London, he began to grow a beard, but was ordered to stop by his superiors: his obituarist Brian Sparkes wrote that they were concerned that he was displaying "arty" inclinations considered unbecoming of a professor. He was a visiting fellow of the BSA for the 1957–1958 academic year. He published his first book, Greek Painting, in 1959. It used the surviving Greek paintings on vases and other artistic works to reconstruct now-lost frescoes described by ancient authors. Between 1959 and 1968, he was chair of the governing council of the BSA. In 1961, Robertson again succeeded Ashmole, this time as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, in which role he served until his retirement in 1978. He edited the second volume of the BSA's excavations at Perachora in 1962, following the deaths of Payne (who had conducted the excavations) and of the editors initially appointed to publish the work. In 1968–1969, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; he also held a visiting appointment at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1980. In 1992, he published The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens, continuing and concluding his scholarly interest in Athenian painting. From 1994, Robertson suffered from Guillain–Barré syndrome and myasthenia gravis. He died of cardiovascular disease and bronchopneumonia at home in Cambridge on 26 December 2004, and was buried in Cambridge City Cemetery. == Influence on classical scholarship ==

As a scholar, Robertson is best remembered for his work on Greek art, in particular vase painting. He improved the techniques developed by Beazley to attribute unsigned works to specific vase-painters.John Boardman, who wrote Robertson's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, described him as a "careful, not enthusiastic lecturer, with a minor voice impediment", and as a diligent supervisor of graduate students, albeit one sometimes excessively slow to criticise their work. ==Poetry==

As a poet Robertson published various collections, including Crooked Connections (1970), For Rachel (1972), A Hot Bath at Bedtime (1975), and ''The Sleeping Beauty's Prince'' (1977). Boardman described his poetry as "personal, often witty and sensitive, [and] much admired by many". He also published translations of Greek poetry, ==Family==

Robertson's mother was killed in 1941 while serving as an air-raid warden in Cambridge. His brother, Giles Henry Robertson, was a professor of art history at the University of Edinburgh. Robertson married Theodosia (known as Cecil; Spring Rice) on 4 September 1942: the couple had six children, including the computer scientist Stephen and the musician Thomas Dolby. Their first child, Lucy, was born while Robertson was posted to Cairo, and raised by Cecil in Iken in Suffolk. While in Suffolk, the Robertsons became friends with the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, the singer Peter Pears. Cecil died in an accident in 1984. Robertson remarried in 1988, to Louise Berge (née Holstein), who had been his graduate student at Oxford in the late 1960s. She was diagnosed with tongue cancer shortly after Robertson's death, and died in February 2022. ==Selected academic publications==

As sole author • • • • • • • • • As co-author • • • • == Notes ==