DUNCAN ROBERT BULL 18 JUNE 1955 - 01 JULY 2025 

It has come to our attention that Duncan Robert Bull (1972O) passed away on 1st July 2025 in Cape Town shortly after his seventieth birthday.  

On behalf of the Bishops community and the ODU we send out deepest condolences to his family. 

Requiescat in Pace.

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Duncan was at Bishops from 1963 - 1972 matriculating in the First Class with distinctions in Mathematics, and was a finalist in the Mathematics Olympiad. 

Duncan was Secretary of the Ten Club in his Matric year, a highly prestigious position selected from the top seniors' academics and a society chaired by the Principal, who at that time was Mr Anthony Mallett.   

The following is taken from The Burlington Magazine - please access for the full encomium. 

"He was an art historian, editor of this Magazine, museum curator, raconteur and harpist. 

Born in Oxford, he moved as an infant to South Africa, where his father’s career as an anaesthesiologist took the family.

Duncan was educated at the Diocesan College in Rondebosch and then the University of Cape Town, receiving a first in English.

In 1976, carrying his harp in a bag sewn together with his mother’s old curtains, the tow-headed twenty-one-yearold eagerly boarded a Union-Castle ship to Southampton and did not set foot in South Africa for the next thirty years.

Having won admission to read art history at Clare College, Cambridge, he was able to argue for a delay in mandatory military service, because the degree programme had a travel requirement that he could not fulfil in South Africa. That was the year of the Soweto uprising. Later, ruthlessly pursued by the South African draft board to return to serve in the army and assist in the regime’s repressive policies, he renounced his passport. 

Duncan received his MA from Cambridge in 1982, having spent the year before as an Andrew Mellon Fellow at Yale University, New Haven, where he published his first exhibition catalogue, Classic Ground: British Artists and the Landscape of Italy.

He planned on pursuing a doctorate at the University of St Andrews on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century collectors of early Italian painting, but a position in the Prints and Drawings Department of the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, opened up.

The study was put on the back burner, although never set aside, particularly as he happily lived as if in the eighteenth century and always maintained a keen interest in the provenance of pictures. In Edinburgh he worked with Keith Andrews, whose stories of visiting continental prints and drawings rooms in the immediate post-war period with Philip Pouncey, followed by nights alone at the opera, enchanted Duncan (opera became a happy obsession for him as well).

He was able to bring out the best and often the funniest in his interlocuters, particularly those of older generations.

Another friend was Steven Runciman, historian of the crusades, whose stories of travelling with Edith Wharton Duncan could repeat in the same tone of voice as he had heard them, although always accompanied by the crescendo of his own laughter. 

...

The Diocesan College in Rondebosch provided good training for Duncan’s musical as well as his poetical ear, although the latter was certainly in part innate."  

Acknowledgement: The Burlington Magazine