Harold Plenderleith

Harold James Plenderleith MC FRSE FCS (19 September 1898 – 2 November 1997) was a 20th century Scottish art conservator and archaeologist.[1] He was a large and jovial character with a strong Dundonian accent.

Biography

Harold Plenderleith was born in Coatbridge[2] on 19 September 1898.[3] He was the eldest child of Robert James Plenderleith who was art master at Harris Academy in Dundee and Harold was consequently educated there, also being school dux.[4] His younger brother was Robert Waldron Plenderleith FRSE.

He then joined University College in St Andrews in 1916 but after two terms went to officer training school due to the First World War becoming a Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1917. He served on the Western Front from August 1917. He received a shrapnel wound in the arm on the Ypres Salient. He was awarded the Military Cross in 1918 for a successful night raid on a German pillbox.[5]

In 1919 he then returned to study Chemistry at University College, Dundee and graduated with a BSc in 1921 and gained his doctorate in 1923.[6] In 1924, he began to work at the British Museum with Dr Alexander Scott in the newly created Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.[7] This department had been created by the museum to address objects in the collection that had begun to rapidly deteriorate as a result of being stored in the London underground railway tunnels during the First World War. Scott and Plenderleith began applying their knowledge of Chemistry to the deterioration of museum objects and began scientific conservation in the United Kingdom. As an archaeologist he was involved in the excavations of the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt, Sir Leonard Woolley's site at Ur, and the Sutton Hoo ship burial.

In 1934 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Alexander Scott, Arthur Pillans Laurie, Sir James Irvine and William Peddie.[8]

In the Second World War he worked with Sir John Forsdyke on the relocation of precious artefacts from the British Museum into mines and quarries in Wales to avoid bomb damage.

Plenderleith retired from the British Museum in 1959 to become the first director of the International Center for the study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM).[9] He was the director of ICCROM until 1971. He helped set up and then served on the Council of the International Institute for Conservation from its creation in 1950 until 1971 and was IIC's President from 1965 to 1968. He received many medals throughout his career, including: the Gold Medal of the Society of Antiquaries in 1964; Unesco Bronze Medal, 1971; the Conservation Service Award of the U.S. Department of the Interior, 1976 and the ICCROM Award, Rome, 1979.

He died in Inverness on 2 November 1997 aged 99.

Family

He was married twice. Firstly (and for over 50 years) he was married in 1926 to Elizabeth K S Smyth. Following Elizabeth's death in 1982, in 1988, aged 90, he married Margaret MacLennan (nee MacLeod). He had four stepchildren by his second marriage but no biological children by either marriage.

Publications

Books
  • The Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art: Treatment, Repair and Restoration by Harold James Plenderleith, A. E. A. Werner. Oxford Univ Pr, ISBN 0-19-212960-0 (0-19-212960-0)
  • The Preservation of Leather Bookbindings by H. J. Plenderleith. British Museum, ISBN 0-7141-0227-X (0-7141-0227-X)
  • Qumran Cave 1 by George L. Harding, D. Barthelemy, J. T. Milik, R. De Vaux, G. M. Crowfoot, Harold James Plenderleith. Oxford Univ Pr, ISBN 0-19-826301-5 (0-19-826301-5)

Chapters

Articles
  • Plenderleith, H. J. & Maryon, Herbert (January 1959). "The Royal Bronze Effigies in Westminster Abbey". The Antiquaries Journal. Society of Antiquaries of London. XXXIX (1–2): 87–90. doi:10.1017/S0003581500083633.
  • Plenderleith, H. J. (1998). "A History of Conservation". Studies in Conservation. International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Work. 43 (3): 129–143. doi:10.1179/sic.1998.43.3.129. JSTOR 1506740.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Honours and awards
  • Gold Medal of the Society of Antiquaries in 1964.
  • Unesco Bronze Medal, 1971.
  • The Conservation Service Award of the U.S. Department of the Interior, 1976.
  • The ICCROM Award, Rome, 1979.

Memorial lecture

Since Plenderleith's death, the Scottish Society for Conservation and Restoration (SSCR) have organised an annual Plenderleith Memorial Lecture, the SSCR merged with several other organizations in 2005 to form the Institute of Conservation, and today the lecture continues annually under the auspices of the Committee of the Icon Scotland Group.[10]

gollark: It has some nice-for-users features like that you can, say, make your disk's contents unreadable if you take it out and stick it in another computer (without also having the TPM to do things to).
gollark: It's basically a bit of hardware built into the CPU for storing secret keys the user isn't meant to be able to access.
gollark: And similar accursed DRM schemes.
gollark: The older ones were low-powered in-order cores for phones and such, but now Atom-branded things go into networking appliances and are actually moderately fast.
gollark: There are lots of Atoms. They aren't actually very consistent in anything.

References
  1. "Obituary: Harold Plenderleith". 6 November 1997.
  2. Independent (newspaper): obituaries 6 November 1997
  3. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 13 June 2011. Retrieved 20 August 2008.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0-902-198-84-X.
  5. Independent (newspaper): obituaries 6 November 1997
  6. "UR-SF 8/3/4/1 Harold James Plenderleith (B.Sc. 1921; Ph.D. 1923), laboratory notes". Archive Services Online Catalogue. University of Dundee. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
  7. https://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/departments/conservation_and_science/history.aspx
  8. Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0-902-198-84-X.
  9. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 29 August 2008. Retrieved 21 August 2008.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  10. "Icon | the Institute of Conservation".
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.