Herbert James Maryon, OBE, FSA, FIIC was an English sculptor, goldsmith, archaeologist, conservator, author, and authority on ancient metalwork. Maryon had, in effect, two careers. As a sculptor, he was the first director of the Keswick School of Industrial Art, a teacher of sculpture at Reading University, and Master of Sculpture at Durham University. He retired in 1939. After World War II Maryon was recruited out of retirement to begin his second career, as a Technical Attaché at the British Museum. There, in addition to other tasks, he conserved the major finds from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, an Anglo-Saxon grave widely identified with King Rædwald of East Anglia—the work for which Maryon is best known, and which in 1956 led to his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.Born in London, by his mid-twenties Maryon had attended three art schools, apprenticed in silversmithing with C. R. Ashbee, and worked in Henry Wilson's workshop. From 1900 to 1904 he served as the director of the Keswick School of Industrial Art, where he designed and exhibited numerous utilitarian and decorative Arts and Crafts works. A year of teaching metalwork at the Storey Institute preceded a move to Reading University, where until 1927 he taught sculpture, metalwork, modelling, and casting. He then worked until 1939 at Durham University as Master of Sculpture and lecturer in anatomy and the history of sculpture. Maryon published two books while a teacher, including the standard Metalwork and Enamelling, and continued sculpting. Among other works he was commissioned to design memorial plaques and war memorials, such as the University of Reading War Memorial. He also published more than a dozen articles about early metalwork and archaeology, and brought students along on digs; in 1935 he excavated the Kirkhaugh cairns, discovering one of the oldest gold ornaments yet known in Britain.Maryon's second career began when the British Museum hired him in 1944 to work on the Sutton Hoo finds, newly removed from their World War II hiding place in the London Underground. His responsibilities included restoring the shield, the drinking horns, and the iconic Sutton Hoo helmet, which was widely publicised and both academically and culturally influential. Maryon's work, much of which was revised in the 1970s, created credible renderings upon which subsequent research and the objects' ultimate forms relied. One of his papers during this time coined the term pattern welding to describe a method employed on the Sutton Hoo sword, among others, to strengthen and decorate iron and steel. When the initial work on the Sutton Hoo finds was brought to a close in 1950, Maryon turned to other matters; in 1953 he proposed a widely-publicised theory of the construction of the Colossus of Rhodes, influencing Salvador Dalí among others, and in 1955 he restored the Roman Emesa helmet. Maryon left the museum in 1961—a year after his official retirement—and began an around-the-world trip, lecturing and researching Chinese magic mirrors as he went.Maryon died in 1965. In the succeeding decades he has been termed [o]ne of the finest exemplars of a conservator whose wide understanding of the structure and function of museum objects ... exceeds that gained by the curator or historian in more classical studies of artefacts. His works remain influential, particularly Metalwork and Enamelling, which remains in print more than a century after its initial publication.
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