Obituary: D. E. L. Haynes

Denys Eyre Lankester Haynes, museum curator: born Harrowgate 15 February 1913; Assistant Keeper, Victoria and Albert Museum 1937-39; Assistant Keeper, British Museum 1939-54, Deputy Keeper, 1954-56, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1956-76; Geddes-Harrower Professor of Greek Art and Archaeology, Aberdeen University 1972-73; Chairman, Society for Libyan Studies 1974; Visitor, Ashmolean Museum 1979-87; married 1951 Sybille Overhoff; died Oxford 27 September 1994.

D. E. L. HAYNES was perhaps one of the last gentleman-scholars to have served the British Museum: first as Assistant Keeper, then as Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities. He combined a great love of art with remarkable scholarly and organisational gifts.

Denys Haynes was educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge, and then spent a year as a Scholar at the British School at Rome. His first appointment was in 1937 to the Metalwork Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Here he made lifelong friends with a number of other scholars from different departments. After only two years in the V & A, however, he was called to the British Museum in 1939 by Bernard Ashmole, who had just agreed to take on the Keepership of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in addition to his position as Yates Professor at University College London. There, Haynes worked alongside the other young Assistant Keeper, Martin Robertson. The international scene soon became particularly threatening, as a European war loomed large, and orders for the packing and storage of the museum's vast collections were eventually given.

This was the beginning of a new phase in Haynes's life. Careful scholarship was replaced by the cheerful camaraderie of the joint operation of organising and effecting such a vast upheaval. When this was complete and the museum closed, he transferred to the War Office at Whitehall. His innate modesty kept him from talking much about his service in the Second World War, but it is clear that his work in the Intelligence Corps was very important, especially his period in General Alexander's Map Room as he swept north from Naples to Florence, and his role in the hunt for Mussolini's papers.

In 1943 Haynes was appointed Antiquities Officer in Tripoli, where he wrote his Historical and Archaeological Guide to Ancient Tripolitania (1946), which he described as a 'little book . . . written primarily for the military tourist'. That it was in fact much more is demonstrated by the publication of a completely revised version some 10 years later by the Antiquities Department of Tripolitania, Libya.

Haynes returned to the British Museum in September 1946 to help in the return of the collections and the restoration of both buildings and exhibitions. By the time Ashmole moved on to Oxford's Lincoln Chair for Classical Archaeology in 1956 many of the classical antiquities were once again on view, but the succession of Haynes to the Keepership was to bring a new era.

One of his first great tasks was to oversee the restoration of the Duveen Gallery that had been specially built for the Parthenon sculptures between 1936 and 1938 from money given by Sir Joseph (later Lord) Duveen. Although the gallery had been completed in 1938 and the scheme for the sculptures worked out, the war prevented its opening and it was severely damaged by bombing in 1940. The gallery was finally opened to the public in 1962 and in the same year Haynes published An Historical Guide to the Sculptures of the Parthenon, which was a thorough reworking of earlier guides to the sculpture with a completely new historical underpinning.

The next aim was a thorough refurbishment and redesign of all the ground-floor Greek and Roman galleries. Haynes planned and completed, with the help of his colleagues and the architects RY Goodden and RD Russell, and their associate designer Robin Wade, a series of 15 galleries leading the visitor on a thrilling progress from the Greek Bronze Age through the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods, until finally the Roman era was reached. On the way great monuments were displayed with high drama - the remarkable Bassae frieze in a specially designed room, the size of the interior of the temple of Apollo from which it had come, and the towering Nereid monument dominating a whole room of its own. These galleries were opened by the Queen in July 1969, only seven years after the Duveen Gallery had been opened.

Despite the enormous organisational demands of these great enterprises Haynes managed to keep working on ancient bronzes, an interest developed during his time at the V & A. In this field he greatly advanced the subject by demonstrating for the first time the real techniques used by the Greeks for the production of their large bronze sculptures. His long love for Greek bronzes came to fruition with his masterly book The Technique of Greek Bronze Statuary (1992).

In 1951 Denys Haynes married Sybille Overhoff. She stood by him throughout his great museum projects and proved a constant companion in scholarship as well as marriage. They always seemed an inseparable team. Their circle of friends - artists, including Oscar Kokoschka, as well as scholars and writers - will surely miss him. In the Greek and Roman Department of the British Museum, we shall miss too his calm, dignified presence, ever courteous, ever encouragingly sympathetic, which in his later years, after his retirement, had become something shiningly clear and good.

(Photograph omitted)