Nigel Reuben Rook Williams was an English conservator and expert on the restoration of ceramics and glass. From 1961 until his death he worked at the British Museum, where he became the Chief Conservator of Ceramic and Glass in 1983. His most significant work came at the beginning and the end of his professional life, with his reconstructions of the Sutton Hoo helmet and the Portland Vase. Williams died at age 47 of a heart attack while in Aqaba, Jordan, working on a British Museum excavation.
About Nigel Williams (conservator) in brief
Nigel Reuben Rook Williams was an English conservator and expert on the restoration of ceramics and glass. From 1961 until his death he worked at the British Museum, where he became the Chief Conservator of Ceramic and Glass in 1983. His most significant work came at the beginning and the end of his professional life, with his reconstructions of the Sutton Hoo helmet and the Portland Vase. Between these achievements Williams also pieced together the nearly 31,000 fragments of Greek vases found in the wreck of HMS Colossus. Williams died at age 47 of a heart attack while in Aqaba, Jordan, working on a British Museum excavation. The Ceramics & Glass group of the Institute of Conservation awards a biennial prize in his honour, recognising his significant contributions in the field of conservation. He was one of the first people to study conservation, not yet recognised as a profession, and from an early age was given responsibility over high-profile objects. Williams also proved skillful at working with archaeological finds; among other tasks he saw to the lifting from the earth of a medieval tile kiln and a Roman mosaic—likely the Hinton St Mary Mosaic, thought to be the earliest known depictions of Christ.
The first major success for Williams came during the re-excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial from 1965–1970. In 1968 he was put in charge of conserving many of the objects, chiefly among them the shield, drinking horns, and maplewood bottles, which he spent 18 months rearranging and rearranging. Williams’s colleagues at the museum termed his Sutton Hoo Helmet the iconic artefact de résistance; it had previously been restored in 1945–1946 by Herbert Maryon. In 1971 he spent more than 18 months and a full year rearranging more than 500 fragments of the helmet, including the shield and drinking horns. In 1988 and 1989, Williams’s crowning achievement came when he took to pieces the most famous glass object in the world, and put it back together. The reconstruction was again televised for a BBC programme, and as with the Sutton Hoo helmet, took nearly a year to complete.
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