Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC (/riːd/; 4 December 1893 – 12 June 1968) was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. He was a professor of fine art at Edinburgh University from 1931 to 1933, a lecturer in art at the University of Liverpool (1935-36), Leon Fellow at University of London (1940-42), and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1953-54). The eldest of four children of tenant farmer Herbert Edward Read (1868–1903) and his wife Eliza Strickland, Read was born at Muscoates Grange, near Nunnington, about four miles south of Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding of Yorkshire. In Herbert Read- The Stream and the Source (1972), George Woodcock wrote: "rural memories are long... nearly sixty years after Read's father... had died and the family had left Muscoates, I heard it said that 'the Reads were snobs'. They employed a governess (and) rode to hounds..." After his father's death, the family, being tenants rather than owners, had to leave the farm; Read was sent to a school for orphans at Halifax, West Yorkshire, and his mother took a job managing laundry in Leeds, where Read later joined her. Read's studies at the University of Leeds were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, during which he served with the Green Howards in France.