Richard Harding Randall Jr. ’48

We lost a distinguished scholar, an able museum administrator, and a blithe spirit in the July 3, 1997, death of Dick Randall.

A native Baltimorean, Dick prepared at Calvert, Gilman and Pomfret schools, and spent two years with the 4th Armored Division in France and Germany. He majored in architecture, comanaged the 150-lb. football team, and joined Colonial. He earned a master's in art history from Harvard.

From 1953-59 he was assistant, then associate, curator of mediaeval art at the Cloisters. He next became assistant curator of decorative arts at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. In 1953 he married the love of his life, Lilian "Pooh" Cramer, a fellow mediaevalist and curator.

Dick returned to Baltimore, where he was director of the Walters Art Gallery from 1965-81; he was curator of mediaeval art until 1985. His books and 150 articles on arms and armor, decorative arts, American furniture, and mediaeval art are considered definitive. Critic John Russell termed Dick's magnum opus, The Golden Age of Ivory: Gothic Carvings in North American Collections "one of the more voluptuous art books." Dick took special pride--"the best thing I've done since retirement"--in completing the restoration of the neo-Gothic Corpus Christi Church, in Baltimore.

Dick is survived by Pooh, children Christopher, Julia, and Kate, and sister Julia. The class extends its deepest sympathy to them and, somehow, shares in their loss.

The Class of 1948