Sir Robert Bruce-gardner
Art historian who specialised in Tibetan thangka painting
SIR ROBERT BRUCE-GARDNER, 3rd Bt, who has died aged 74, was head conservator at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and a leading expert on Tibetan thangka painting.
As well as their aesthetic and historical context, the ethical dimension of working with thangkas exercised Bruce-gardner greatly. The scroll paintings play an important role in Buddhist ritual and are said to be inhabited by gods. Yet it is not unusual for the imagery of thangkas to be painted over and the cloth reused, an act of desecration to the average western art conservator. But, wrote Bruce-gardner in 1988, the ethics of thangka conservation “will be one of our own defining. It cannot be one that equates with the practices and perceptions of the Tibetans themselves”.
Bruce-gardner pioneered a form of “technical art history”, in which forensic investigation drove the story behind a work. At the Courtauld, he worked on more than 3,000 paintings, including Rubens’s Landscape by Moonlight and Bruegel’s Landscape with the Flight into Egypt. He submitted Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-bergère to X-ray, leading to new insights. Bruce-gardner analysed the meticulous brushwork used by the French Impressionist when depicting the reflection of the barmaid. In doing so he established that the strange ambiguity of the scene was deliberate.
Robert Henry Brucegardner was born on June 10 1943 in Didsbury, Manchester, one of three children and the only son of Sir Douglas Bruce-gardner, 2nd Bt, an industrialist and one-time chairman of British Iron and Steel Corporation, by his first marriage to Monica Jefferson.
The baronetcy had been established in 1945 for Robert’s grandfather, an industrialist specialising in mechanical and aircraft production. Robert was born in the home of his maternal grandfather, Professor Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, a pioneering neurosurgeon.
He attended prep school at Terra Nova in Cheshire, which he disliked for its strict atmosphere. He went on to Uppingham, then spent a year travelling in Asia, the first of many trips to the continent (he become familiar with Lhasa, Mount Kailash, Kham, Kathmandu and Ulan Bator). On return to Britain he studied Fine Art at the University of Reading.
After graduation he took an internship at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, before being accepted to the Courtauld in 1968, on the recommendation of its director, Anthony Blunt. He became a staff member on completion of his Master’s, and stayed at the college until his retirement in 1999, working first under Stephen Rees Jones, before becoming head of the Department of Conservation and Technology in 1989.
A spirited and eccentric dresser, with a penchant for velvet jackets and pashminas, he built a close-knit team into which his wide vocabulary and love of cryptic crosswords and correct grammar struck both admiration and fear.
In 1987, Bruce-gardner coauthored Impressionist and Post-impressionist Masterpieces: The Courtauld Collection, a catalogue produced to coincide with an exhibition that went on tour in the United States, including to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and to which he contributed an essay on the use of x-ray, infrared and ultraviolet photography, raking light and surface microscopy to illuminate the techniques of painters such as Manet, Cezanne, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, van Gogh and Seurat.
In 1998 the Met published a landmark text by Brucegardner on the technical aspects of Tibetan painting. This essay ran in the museum’s catalogue for Sacred Visions: Early Paintings from Central Tibet, a major exhibition of Himalayan painting of the same year.
Robert Bruce-gardner inherited the baronetcy on his father’s death in 1997.
In 1979 he married Veronica Hand-oxborrow, who survives him with two sons.
Sir Robert Bruce-gardner, 3rd Bt, born June 10 1943, died September 6 2017