John Mills
Scientist and carpet expert who used gas chromatography to explore the National Gallery’s treasures
JOHN MILLS, who has died aged 91, performed long and distinguished public service in the sciences and arts, most notably in science, through his inspired laboratory work in the Scientific Department of the National Gallery, which he joined in 1951 and directed from 1984 until 1990.
His speciality was to use the instrumental method of analysis known as gas chromatography to examine in micro-samples from paintings the natural products that had been used as paint binders in European art over seven centuries.
Martin Wyld, formerly the Gallery’s Chief Restorer, recalled that Mills was also “good fun”, his friendship with artists and wide cultural knowledge “unusual for someone working in such a specialised area”.
Paint is a mixture of mostly inorganic mineral pigments ground to powders and bound by the addition of an organic medium, in western painting typically egg or drying oil. Colour in paint is provided by pigment; Mills’s speciality was the binding medium, a far more complex subject.
Aided by such colleagues as Raymond White and Ashok Roy, his directorial successor, Mills ensured that the Gallery led the world in this rarefied field of analysis. His book The Organic Chemistry of Museum Objects, with Raymond White, published in 1987, is a classic text.
John Mills’s fundamental scientific work on traditional binding media for Old Master paintings remains the starting point and touchstone for this vital subject in painting conservation, and is acknowledged by museum scientists around the world. For many years Mills edited the International Institute for Conservation (IIC) journal, Studies
He was also a world authority on oriental carpets, which arose from his interest in those shown in paintings. He curated the 1983 exhibition “Carpets in Paintings” at the National Gallery and masterminded “The Eastern Carpet in the Western World”, curated by his friend David Sylvester, the art critic, at the Hayward Gallery in 1983. Here, too, his scholarship is preserved in print, beginning with his 1975 book Carpets in Pictures.
John Stuart Mills was born at home in Guildford on September 7 1928. The Mills had traditionally been millers at Guildford’s water mills but his grandfather founded a printing business, where he employed his son from the age of 12 – the same age as Charles Dickens when he was put into the blacking factory, John Mills noted.
His father worked in the business for 70 years, eventually as its director, but always resented the loss of childhood and education, and in consequence was a notably kind parent.
His father’s education came from his work and was to benefit his highly cultured son. Like his father, John was a stickler for grammar and pronunciation, a solid grounding for the rigours required of science. He abhorred
Americanisms like “Har-ass-ment”, and on his deathbed woke from an apparent coma to correct the nurse’s mispronunciation of the drug she was delivering.
With wry wit, he recalled parental sayings such as one of his father’s biblical favourites, “Put not your trust in princes”. And in a charming memoir, Which Yet Survive (2019), he remembered his father’s fondness for a seemingly innocuous line from Robinson Crusoe, “Relieved of its weight the raft floated again.” “Not least,” wrote Mills, “when the sound of the front door closing indicated my mother’s departure.” Just how much the world has changed was illustrated by his childhood memory of charcoal burners in the Guildford woods.
Very bright, he won a place at Guildford grammar school aged nine, and requested a chemistry set for his 11th birthday: “As with any other small boy, a prime objective was to produce explosions.” Nitrogen triiodide made a gratifying number of mini-explosions when scattered wet on the floor in geography class; and amyl nitrate had a “dramatic” effect on his teenage “complexion and mood … this was long before one had heard anything about its medical and recreational uses”.
At school he began a lifelong friendship with the future painter Victor Willing. Love of music and literature was their bond but it was through Willing, who went on to the Slade, that Mills gained access to London’s bohemia. Willing’s second wife, the artist Paula Rego, their children and friends, would be his “family” for the better part of his adult life.
National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals had him posted to the Far East as a wireless mechanic. It awoke his need to travel. It was an era when living was cheap and mass tourism as yet unknown. In 1949 Mills found Paris, unlike London, “a sort of Babylon – there appeared to be no shortage of anything”.
But London could provide a topfloor flat in Chepstow Villas for £4 a week, a Covent Garden gallery ticket for 2/6 (12.5p); and in Spain £2 bought train vouchers guaranteeing 3,000 kilometres of travel. It was a time of parties, of characterful neighbourhoods and bohemian “characters”. Francis Bacon told him he had run a very profitable illegal gambling den for two years but gave it up because “it was too much trouble”.
Such distractions led to a poor degree from Imperial College but a chance visit to his alma mater’s noticeboard offered a Nuffield Scholarship to research the effects of solvents on paint and varnish at the National Gallery. Nothing could have better combined his love of science and art. He applied and was selected; the course of his life was set. David Sylvester called Mills a “Fifties man”. Ashok Roy recalled Mills looking back on that time “with self-involved nostalgia and longing”.
When the scholarship ended Mills pursued his research in the US under Professor Carl Djerassi, “the father of the Pill” but also a writer of everything from poems to plays.
At Djerassi’s invitation he moved to Mexico to work on steroid research for the Syntex company. He visited Mayan temples still buried in the jungle and completed his PHD. After four years, homesickness took him back to London – along with a pink Chrysler convertible – where he rejoined the National Gallery as senior scientific officer.
It was Mills and the painter Keith Sutton who first inspired David Sylvester’s interest in carpets. Sylvester built a reputation as a collector, concentrating on worn and faded examples of important types. Mills and Sutton called them “David’s ghosts”.
Carpets spurred Mills to further travel, which he did with a bachelor’s freedom.
Perhaps what most marked Mills as a “Fifties man” was his reason for taking early retirement at 62: “For some reason an administrator had been brought in – I think from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries – to bring us more into line with ministerial ways rather than continue in the relaxed style which had served us so well.”
Under his benign rule staff had felt “equal and equally committed”; now assessments reintroduced a hierarchy which he found “very embarrassing and even offensive”.
In retirement he continued to travel widely but eventually withdrew to the Isle of Wight. His neighbours were the writer Cas Willing, whom he had known all her life through her parents Victor Willing and Paula Rego, and her husband, the sculptor Ron Mueck. It was fitting that they should be the chief consolation of his last days.