Blunt persisted, turned down all other applicants, and kept phoning until he relented. "The thing was," Steer says now, "that it was completely the right job for me. He was both manipulative and right."Abroad, Blunt was often described as the most powerful man in British art history, and it is hard to think of a figure of equivalent influence in another area of the humanities: certainly, today this degree of concentration of power could not happen; by an ironic twist it was the very creation of the new courses that diluted the uniqueness and authority of the Courtauld.Blunt went on talent-spotting well into the 1970s. In his final year as director on a Courtauld summer school to Bavaria in 1973, he encountered a 27-year-old Scottish lawyer, Neil MacGregor, who had given up the bar to study art history in Edinburgh.
MacGregor was a fluent French speaker with a wide knowledge of French art and literature and a quick wit Blunt was sure he had found a star. He set about persuading MacGregor to give up his Edinburgh course and come to the Courtauld, where Blunt promised to tutor him personally "It was extraordinary," one witness recalled. "Blunt lay siege to him." MacGregor was won over – from the Courtauld he went to a teaching job at Reading University, to the editorship of the Burlington Magazine (Blunt had been a member of its editorial panel for 30 years), and thence to the National Gallery, where he is widely held to have been a hugely successful director. He is nowrumoured to be on the verge of becoming the next director of the British Museum.Even now, 18 years after he left the Courtauld and 22 years since his exposure as a Soviet spy, Blunt's mark is still apparent. Apart from MacGregor, Nick Serota, head of the Tate Modern, was a postgraduate at the Courtauld in the 1960s; and Nicholas Penny, the man hotly tipped as MacGregor's successor should he go to the BM, was another graduate of the early 1970s who, though not taught by Blunt, was also encouraged by him.Such achievements may sound like career enough for any man. In fact, fixing and patronage was only one strand of Blunt's life as an art historian. As a writer, his publications spanned studies on Picasso, essays on William Blake and ground-breaking research on Poussin – it is hard to think of another British art historian whose range was so wide.
His life-long study of Poussin played an important role in turning the artist from a difficult, unfashionable painter into an old master of the first rank. He was a great teacher, charming and enthusing by example: in tutorials, he seemed to shed his customary reserve and treated his pupils with a seriousness and courtesy that surprised and flattered them. He was an equally compelling lecturer: Nancy Mitford wrote of hearing him lecture in perfect French at the Louvre: "I went to a masterly lecture by a man called Sir Anthony Blunt... Who is this Sir? I am in Love."As surveyor of the Queen's pictures, he oversaw and modernised the management of one of the largest private art collections in the world. He was the National Trust's first picture adviser, unofficial curator at the Royal Academy, editorial consultant to the Burlington Magazine, and sat on innumerable art committees and panels.
