Westby Percival-Prescott; conservator & painter
Hyfler/Rosner
"His published paper was entitled "Eastlake Revisited: some
milestones on the road to ruin" - and a sober lecture on the
technical failings of 19th-century artists and restorers was
anticipated. But he arrived complete with props and costume
changes - and, roaming about the stage, he proceeded to
enact, with shouts and cries and melodramatic dying falls,
the withering away by time, neglect and foul mistreatment of
a family portrait."
From The Independent ~
26 February 2005
Westby William Percival-Prescott, conservator and painter:
born Cambridge 22 January 1923; Head of Picture Conservation
Department, National Maritime Museum 1961-83, Keeper and
Head of Picture Department 1977-83; married 1948 Silvia
Haswell Miller (one son); died St Leonards, East Sussex 22
January 2005.
Westby Percival-Prescott was one of the last surviving
members of a pioneering group of paintings conservators in
the era after the Second World War that took the old
empirical craft tradition of picture restoration and made of
it an ethical profession.
The most productive part of his career was spent at the
National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and he not only
created the department of conservation there, but also gave
it an international prominence and influence far greater
than might have been expected for a museum of such
specialised focus. In particular, he and his colleagues
became associated with research into methods of lining
paintings - the common practice of backing old canvases with
new canvas and adhesive, until then routinely applied
whether necessary or not. By questioning the very basis on
which we view the surfaces of paintings, he helped to
achieve a fundamental shift in attitudes in conservators and
curators alike.
Born in Cambridge in 1923, Percival-Prescott came from an
artistic family. His mother, Edith, wrote poems and plays,
and his father, William, was a Nonconformist minister, whose
postings took the family to Plymouth and then to Edinburgh,
where young Westby's early talent won him a scholarship to
Edinburgh College of Art, studying under William Gilles
alongside such fellow students as Alan Davie and Jeffrey
Camp. After wartime commissions to draw historic landmarks
and bridges of the Borders, his skill and admiration for art
drew him - inevitably, it now seems - towards London and a
career as a restorer.
In 1945 he was Andrew Grant Scholar at the National Gallery,
where he returned a decade later, in 1954-56, to work on
Nicolò dell'Abate's great canvas The Death of Eurydice. But
his principal occupation in the years leading up to 1960 was
a series of huge restoration projects with the Ministry of
Works - paintings at Lancaster House and Hampton Court, the
Rubens ceiling in the Whitehall Banqueting House (from 1947
to 1951), the House of Lords frescoes (1953, as restorer in
charge) and, largest of all, Thornhill's Painted Hall at
Greenwich, where he directed the work between 1957 and 1960.
During this period he also found his voice as an advocate
for the emerging profession, becoming active in the unions,
speaking out against dubious practices in the Ministry of
Works and striving to get higher standards recognised for
restorers - or conservators as they were beginning to be
called.
After completion of work on the Painted Hall,
Percival-Prescott remained in Greenwich. He joined the
National Maritime Museum in 1961, establishing the picture
conservation department in the abandoned Old Royal
Observatory - and his use of the South Building for the
conservation studio saved it from almost certain demolition.
His career at the museum was highly distinguished. He
continued to direct paintings conservation until his
retirement in 1983, but also became Keeper and Head of the
Picture Department in 1977. He organised a number of
pioneering exhibitions: "Idea and Illusion" (1960), about
the art and symbolism of Thornhill's work; "Four Steps to
Longitude" (1963), about John Harrison and the marine
chronometer; "The Siege of Malta" (1970), researched and
organised with his wife, Silvia Haswell Miller (daughter of
A.E. Haswell Miller, the painter and former Keeper of the
Scottish National Portrait Gallery), whom he had married in
1948; "Captain Cook and Mr Hodges" (1979); and "The Art of
the Van de Veldes" (1982).
Alongside these formal, public aspects of his work in the
museum, Percival-Prescott was developing a remarkable team
of conservators up in their studio on the hill in Greenwich
Park. Energised by his intense interest in the materials of
old master paintings and his passionate views on ethical
methods of conservation, his department built an
international reputation.
With a few others working at the Courtauld Institute in
London, in the Netherlands and in Denmark, they identified
the lining of canvas paintings as a neglected area of
research and it all culminated in one of the most
significant art conservation events of the modern era - the
1974 conference on "Comparative Lining Techniques" in
Greenwich. Colleagues flew in from all over the world to
discuss a single topic - how to line, indeed whether to line
paintings. To the world at large it might have seemed an
obscure concern, but it was important both in the narrow
sense of considering processes that could irretrievably
alter the textures of pictures - and in the wider sense of
when it is ethical for conservators to intervene at all.
As a result, we suddenly saw works of art in a different
way: we were prepared to tolerate imperfections in untouched
paintings that hitherto would have been routinely
eliminated. We spoke with new conviction of the integrity of
untreated canvases, of paint surfaces that had remained
unaltered since they left the artist's hand, of treatment
methods that would leave the material essence of a work
undisturbed.
Percival-Prescott's contribution to this change of attitude
was immense. His celebrated keynote lecture to the
conference, entitled "The Lining Cycle", vividly sketched
the spiral of repeated treatment and deterioration that
inevitably followed the first major structural intervention.
He called for an international moratorium on lining - which,
although it did not materialise, did have the effect of
concentrating minds on the sea change flowing through the
world of ethical conservation.
He was an inspiring figure, brimming with enthusiasm and new
ideas - a natural communicator and teacher, at ease with
museum directors and students alike. His disarming
assumption that everyone would share his latest interest was
enormously appealing: encountering him by chance in an art
gallery or ancient church, one would be rushed to a painting
to have some particular phenomenon lovingly pointed out and
explained. The sight of him expounding on the technique of
the beautiful Bellini Baptism of Christ in Santa Corona,
Vicenza, blissfully unaware of evening Mass going on all
around him remains fresh in the memory.
His whole professional life was devoted to examining,
researching and disseminating all he could deduce from
pictures in public galleries and private collections all
over Europe, from old treatises and documents, and from the
innumerable experimental samples he made himself. His
various studios were crammed with a profusion of paintings,
paint tests, copies of old masters, frames, rocks, pigments,
oils, resins, waxes, gums, varnishes, solvents, easels,
palettes, brushes, costumes and lay figures. In his
seventies, he applied for and was awarded a Leverhulme
research fellowship to bring all this material together and
to document and record it for others to use, and he
continued with this work - and with his painting and
writing - right up until his death on his 82nd birthday.
Percival-Prescott was a man of great charm - unfailingly
courteous, softly spoken with a faint but unmistakable
Scottish inflection, and always impeccably turned out. His
diplomatic skills served him well on several key
international bodies, most notably the International Council
of Museums Conservation Committee on which he was active
from 1975 to 1984. He was also involved with professional
bodies such as the Association of British Picture Restorers,
continually demonstrating his deep commitment to the
training of young conservators and the raising of standards
of practice.
Unexpectedly, he also had a sense of humour that bordered on
the subversive. His reminiscences of good and bad times up
the scaffolding for the Ministry of Works could be wickedly
funny. However, the occasion that nobody who saw it will
ever forget was his performance at an International
Institute for Conservation conference on the cleaning of
paintings in Brussels in 1990.
His published paper was entitled "Eastlake Revisited: some
milestones on the road to ruin" - and a sober lecture on the
technical failings of 19th-century artists and restorers was
anticipated. But he arrived complete with props and costume
changes - and, roaming about the stage, he proceeded to
enact, with shouts and cries and melodramatic dying falls,
the withering away by time, neglect and foul mistreatment of
a family portrait.
It brought the house down, but the serious points it was
making were not lost on his wildly applauding audience. It
remains a much-loved memory of an unforgettable, deeply
thoughtful and altogether delightful man.
David Bomford