Elizabeth Phillimore BusbyNancy Ackerman/The Globe and Mail
Museum conservation pioneer, artist, wife, mother. Born on Dec. 11, 1923, in Kitchener, Ont.; died on Dec. 29, 2015, in Toronto, of natural causes, aged 92.
When I first met Elizabeth Phillimore in the 1970s, she invited me into the conservation lab at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She was cleaning two paintings, the National Gallery of Canada's Death of Wolfe and a small Krieghoff. She explained how she started with the eyes to free the person's soul. Wolfe's face was lit by the light of heaven amid the murky varnish. The Krieghoff depicted a moonlit Indian encampment with canoes and tepees. When she removed a heavily overpainted area of the tepees, a castle appeared. It was surreal and startlingly funny, half-castle, half-tepee by moonlight, a genre painting tarted up for the Canadiana market!
Elizabeth almost single-handledly established museum conservation as a profession in Canada. When she was hired by the ROM in 1958, no Canadian museum had a conservation lab. In the 1960s and '70s, she was indefatigable: writing scholarly papers, organizing conferences, taking courses, always learning, always teaching. She helped to found the Canadian Conservation Institute and establish training standards for museum professionals. She was one of the people who made the ROM into a world-class museum.
Elizabeth Wilson was born in Kitchener, Ont., with two older sisters in a middle-class home. In 1944, just before her 21st birthday, she enlisted in the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service and served in Scotland and England, careening around bombed-out London on a motorcycle. In 1947 she studied painting at the Ontario College of Art, then returned to London, where she became adept at restoring the fingers of Meissen figurines; there were a lot of broken porcelain fingers in post-war London.
There she married John Phillimore, with whom she had two daughters, Francesca and Dominique. They spent two summers as forest rangers in Northern Ontario, sitting above the tree tops while Elizabeth painted. One morning she woke to find John gone; he had taken a midnight flight to London.
Now a single mother, she went to work at the ROM as a restorer. With little formal training, she learned the chemical composition of ancient and modern paints, the corrosion on bronze and pottery, the effects of X-rays, light and humidity. With her flaming red hair, she was a force of nature. An evening with her could range from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Jungian archetypes and end with great hilarity. Fiercely intelligent, intensely curious, she had an insatiable desire to document everything – her work, her life, her soul.
"Elizabeth Phillimore's world is a strange, allegorical dream world," an art critic wrote of a 1974 exhibition of her paintings. "The artist pulls aside the curtain of privacy and admits us to the secret chamber – Self. That is the subject matter. Herself, and the human dilemma as it applies to Woman."
She played a key role in the ROM's 1980 renovations, working with curators, architects and designers to create the ideal museum. Her crowning achievement was restoring the famous Chinese temple frescoes. When the frescoes were taken down, they were "de-conserved," cut into the original panels and taken to an outside lab. I visited that lab, too, and found the gods of heaven and earth sliced into a checkerboard of halos and tiaras, hands and draperies. Elizabeth was cleaning the back of one panel, picking away the yellow sand, grain by grain.
In her 70s, she reconnected with Stuart Busby, her special friend during the war years. By then a urological surgeon in London, Ont., he was a widower with three grown children. They married in 1998 and she moved to London. After Stuart died in 2007, she moved into Sunnybrook Veterans Centre in Toronto.
"Mine has been a life filled with ancient images," she once wrote, "it's what I do, it's what I know … I have been able to get up close to the real thing, to see the coarseness of the gritty earth reds, smell the age, follow the brush strokes of the painter, let the stunning iron reds sink into my eye and brain."
Alvyn Austin is a friend of Elizabeth's.