George David Smith Henderson (born 1931 in Aberdeen, Scotland) is a British art historian, author, and Emeritus Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of The Society of Antiquaries of London (elected January 1975)[1] and a member of the Association of Art Historians.[2] He was awarded the Reginald Taylor Prize by the British Archaeological Association in 1962 for his paper "The Sources of the Genesis Cycle at St.-Savin-sur-Gartempe".
Professor Henderson is the son of George David Henderson (1888-1957),[3] a Church of Scotland minister and an ecclesiastical historian with a number of books to his name, and Janet Henderson (née Smith).[4]
Educated at the University of Aberdeen (BA, 1953), University of London (MA, 1956) and Cambridge (MA & PhD, 1961), George Henderson went on to have a long career in academia. He was a Research Fellow at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, 1960-1961, a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Manchester, 1963-1966, and a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Edinburgh, 1966-1973.
Henderson was appointed to Cambridge University as a Lecturer in the History of Art and Fellow of Downing College in 1974, having previously worked at Downing College for a brief period in the early 1960s.
Henderson was a Visiting Lecturer[5] at the Courtauld Institute of Art and has donated photographs to the Conway Library which are currently being digitised as part of the Courtauld Connects project.[6]
In 1984 he was a founding member of the steering committee of the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium,[7] an annual event held at Harlaxton Manor started by Pamela Tudor-Craig.
A book to honour his work was published in 2001, New Offerings, Ancient Treasures: Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson, edited by Paul Binski and William Noel[8] and he is also recognised in The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture[9] as being an influence on the art historian and medievalist Michael Camille.
George Henderson is married to Isabel Henderson, Fellow Emerita of Newnham College, Cambridge[10] and an eminent academic in her own right. The Guardian, when reviewing the book she co-authored with her husband, The Art of the Picts: Sculpture and Metalwork in Early Medieval Scotland, described her as ‘the great doyenne of Pictish art’.[11]