This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Englishness of English Art, given by Nicholas Pevsner, was originally broadcast in 1955.

We present the first of the BBC's Reith Lectures for 1955.

This series is given by Dr. Nicholas Pevsner, head of the Department of History of Art,

Birkbeck College, University of London,

and recently Slate Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge.

The subject, Dr. Pevsner has chosen for his seven lectures,

is the Englishness of English art,

and he has called his first lecture the geography of art.

I belong to the happy few who can make a living out of studying the history of art

and out of communicating the results of their studies to others.

Now, why should one study the history of art? There are, of course, two questions contained

in this one. Why should one take an interest in art and why should one take an interest in

history? I suggest that an understanding and appreciation of the work of the artist

adds to the truly valuable pleasures and thereby enhances one's life.

That poetry or music can do that, no one denies.

But the revelations which can reach us through the eye are less familiar.

Now, you may go to any great museum and just let work of art after work of art speak to you as it comes.

But you'll find after a time that you need history to understand and even to appreciate

art. You'll see differences between, say, one statue and another, which are not merely personal,

but must be the result of a distance of several centuries between the two. The historian of art, after having looked at a statue or a picture or a chair, purely for its own sake,

then asks himself what it can tell us of the age that made it.

...