Robert Hoozee (1949-2012), museum director and art historian, curator of British Vision at The Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (2007-8).
“In the five-year preparation for British Vision, Hoozee had selected us as his advisors, along with the distinguished Turner scholar John Gage, and we watched with astonishment as this reserved, meticulous and apparently cautious Belgian steadily raised a modest initial project into a radical and spectacular rethinking of the British canon. With his passionate interest in Stanley Spencer … and his sympathy for the visionary – Blake, Gillray, Dadd – Hoozee turned out to have a very unusual take on matters English, probably unparalleled among European museum directors’ (obituary by Andrew Dempsey and Timothy Hyman, The Independent, 8 March 2012)
