Obituary: Kathleen Morand (1915-2007)
Dr. Kathleen Morand died in Kingston, Ontario, on 2 December 2007 in her 93rd year. Born Kathleen Little on 13 August, 1915 in Belfast, she married Sigmund Morand in the mid-1930s, and they lived in London until they divorced amicably in the 1960s. She attended the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University, and graduated there with an M.A. in 1955 and Ph.D. degree in 1958. In Britain she taught as an Extra-Mural Lecturer, University of London, from 1956-1959, and as Senior Lecturer at Brighton College of Art (now part of the University of Sussex) from 1967 to 1969, before going to the USA as an Associate Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she remained until 1970. She joined the Department of Art at Queen’s University in Kingston in 1970, already a respected medievalist. She rapidly rose to Full Professor and was Head of Department from 1978 to 1983. When she retired in 1985 she had played a leading role in advancing the Art History programs, and her medieval seminars were widely respected.
Dr. Morand’s publications include her seminal work on Claus Sluter: Artist at the court of Burgundy (1991); a monograph on Jean Pucelle (1962), and a chapter on the Boucicaut Master in French Painting in the time of Jean de Berry, edited by Millard Meiss (1968), to whom she was assistant editor. Her book on Sluter covers his entire oeuvre, but concentrates on his sculptures for the Chartreuse de Champmol and the Moses Fountain at Dijon, and the Tomb of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, to whom he was chief court sculptor. Dr. Morand’s other publications include exhibition reviews written for The Burlington Magazine when she was living partly in Paris during the early 1960s, and a number of entries for the Encyclopedia Britannica written during the same era. She wrote a review article for the Burlington on the major exhibition “Art and the Courts” held in Ottawa in 1972, and published an article on “Claus Sluter, the early years” in Liber amicorum Herman Liebaers, Brussels 1984.
During the years of her retirement, Dr. Morand lived in a historic house in the center of Kingston, in which she kept her substantial library and an important collection of Canadian paintings. She lived alone but was visited frequently by many of her friends. She passed away peacefully at Kingston General Hospital following a stroke.
Bruce Laughton
Professor Emeritus
Queen’s University