Foreword

A Festschrift in honour of Dr Jonathan Ashley-Smith ACR FIIC FRSC FMA FRSA

This Festschrift, a collection of writings by colleagues, friends and former students, is intended to honour the outstanding contribution that Jonathan has made to the field of conservation and to the conservation profession, not only academically but also in many other significant ways. His leadership style, his wide-ranging intellect, his maverick nature and his lifetime commitment to our sphere of endeavour have all left a lasting impression on those of us who have encountered him. He has changed the way we think and he has helped us to grow up as a profession at a critical time in our development.

The boss

I first met Jonathan in 1990 at my interview for a junior conservator position at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Jonathan had joined the Conservation Department of the V&A in 1973 as a conservation chemist. By the time we met he had been Head of Department for thirteen years and was responsible for around 70 staff. For those of us who were fortunate to work in his department, life was never dull and there were always opportunities to be had.

It was a time when conservation was still a back-room function and invisible not only to the public but to the other departments in the museum. Jonathan was always on the lookout for the chance to raise conservation’s profile and saw one when the Museum began to send major exhibitions to multiple venues around the world. He soon moved his staff into position on the relevant project teams and they began to play key roles in planning, risk management, condition reporting and, to our delight at the time, international courier trips.

His department was outward looking. Everyone, including junior conservators, were encouraged to learn presentation skills and put them into practice. Before websites had been invented, he started the V&A Conservation Journal, a publication that not only promoted the department far and wide but also strengthened the bonds of identity that held the department together. He supported his staff’s development, for example by personally helping those older conservators with a fear of writing to publish. And in revamping the department to deal with a flat reporting structure, Jonathan created four senior management positions whose incumbents went on to significant leadership roles in major institutions, thus breaking the traditional ‘glass ceiling’ for conservators.

The educator

Jonathan has always been passionate (in his cool, laid-back way) about the training and education of conservators. At a time when there were very few graduate courses in the country apart from paintings and archaeological artefact conservation, some of the national museums in London, including the V&A, had established studentships in their specialist studios. This model of students embedded in the department and trained by senior conservation practitioners became the precursor to the innovative RCA/V&A Conservation Course for which Jonathan, with Christopher Frayling, then Head of Humanities at the Royal College of Art (RCA), brokered a new three-way partnership between the V&A, RCA and Imperial College of Science Technology & Medicine.

Students on the course were supported by a full academic programme of both humanities and sciences, taught by some of the greatest minds in their fields. The range of hosts expanded to include major institutions across London and PhDs as well as Masters degrees were offered. The multiplier effect of having students specialising in different disciplines, some very niche, such as nineteenth-century photographic albums, and based in different institutions with serious academic research going on, was huge. At the same time, staff and interns on placement in host museums were welcomed to join in the learning events on the course. All of the partner institutions benefited from this powerhouse of learning and research.

The researcher

Jonathan’s contributions to the knowledge base of our profession are legion and some will be discussed in the papers that follow in this volume. I will restrict myself to mentioning two. In the mid-1990s, Jonathan invited a philosopher, Dr Susan Wilsmore, to the V&A’s Conservation Department to work with us to identify what the philosophical principles were that underpinned our practice and to analyse how we were applying the then-current professional codes of ethics. The outcome of this collaborative exercise was the ‘V&A Ethics Checklist’ (1994), a tool that continues to be used by conservators around the world to aid decision-making.¹

In 1999, Jonathan published Risk Assessment for Object Conservation, the outcome of a sabbatical year when he travelled to museums across the globe to test his theories, and best summed up in his own highly characteristic way: ‘Let’s be honest: an introduction to cost–benefit analysis and risk and stopping telling lies about the environment’.² It was a pioneering book on the subject at a time when risk management of collections was an emerging area, and one that exhibits his trademark sense of humour, lateral thinking, and is written in such a way as to be open to everyone.

The provocateur

Jonathan is a highly sought after speaker on the international conference circuit and lectures widely on courses at home and abroad. His speaking style is accessible, funny and memorable. He is not afraid to stir up controversy or of being unpopular, and is prepared to say the unthinkable—a behaviour that generally has quite a bit of shock value in a small, closely-knit, polite profession such as ours. Most recently, he has set the cat among the pigeons with his view that the profession is at the tipping point of losing practical skills. He has made no bones about the dominance of preventive conservation in museums and in training programmes, leaving little remaining capacity for honing practical skills, a situation that he admits he has contributed to by encouraging conservators to take on new roles. By challenging us to look at difficult questions about where we are headed, Jonathan does the profession a great service. Long may he continue to do so!

Notes

1 The 1994 V&A Ethics Checklist was updated in 2004, see: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conservation-journal/issue-50/the-ethics-checklist-ten-years-on/ and http://media.vam.ac.uk/media/documents/legacy_documents/file_upload/27932_file.pdf (both accessed 23 December 2017).

2 Jonathan Ashley-Smith, interview by Alison Richmond for the FAIC Oral History Project, Winterthur Museum, Library, and Archives, USA, 2008. http://www.conservation-us.org/our-organizations/foundation-(faic)/initiatives/oral-history-project (accessed 20 January 2018).