In Memoriam

Paper conservator Shelley Fletcher, most recently of Gulfport, Florida, was the dynamic leader of paper conservation at the National Gallery of Art from 1976 to 2005. She was a long-time member of the Print Council of America, the American Institute for Conservation (fellow), and the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (fellow).

Shelley was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1943, and her family moved to North Carolina when she was two. She had planned to become a medical doctor and attended Howard University, graduating in 1966 with a BS in biology. The following year, she was hired by Yale University, which allowed her to take courses for free. There she learned about conservation and realized that it seemed like the perfect marriage of her interests in art and science. So, her next stop was New York City to attend New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts; she graduated with an MA in art history in 1971 and a certificate in conservation in 1973.

Before her tenure at the National Gallery of Art, Shelley was a paper conservator at the Library of Congress from 1972 to 1976 and a Smithsonian Research Fellow at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and the National Portrait Gallery from 1971 to 1972. During that fellowship year, she treated an oil on paper painting of the African American preacher Absalom Jones by Raphaelle Peale, which now hangs prominently in the Delaware Art Museum.

While she was at the National Gallery of Art, the department flourished and became recognized for its excellence in conservation and research into artists’ materials and techniques. Shelley’s colleagues in the division remember her as a person of elegance, loyalty, and humor—especially humor. Shelley was highly entertaining, and her laugh was contagious. Not only was she an accomplished connoisseur of prints and drawings, but her fascination with each new avocation, whether it be birding, golf, or wine, resulted in total immersion.

Shelley’s knowledge of prints and drawings from all periods and her contributions to the fields of conservation and art history were remarkable. Her most recent research focused on the paints applied to early woodcuts. Along with the National Gallery of Art’s conservation scientist Lisha Glinsman and renowned German scholar Doris Oltrogge, she published on the pigments on hand-colored fifteenth-century relief prints in the Studies in the History of Art, volume 75 (2009). Glinsman fondly recalls attending a medieval colorant painting workshop with Shelley and paper conservator Yoonjoo Strumfels. The fifteenth-century Netherlandish, hand-colored woodcut pictured with Shelley (above) was included in the exhibition catalogue Origins of European Printmaking (2005), for which she contributed an appendix on the papers and watermarks.

One cannot think of Shelley without remembering her notable work on Italian engravings, particularly those by Andrea Mantegna, on whose prints she published two articles in Print Quarterly. In “A Closer Look at Mantegna’s Prints” (2001), she scrutinizes minute details of the artist’s unique engraving technique and compares prints to determine authorship and suggest a chronology of their preparation. Shelley stated, “This research deals with the connoisseurship of technique. It is not scientific in the strict sense and in fact is in the end no less subjective, no less based on a knowledgeable eye, than is the attribution of style. Technical connoisseurship gathers and uses a different kind of information: the details of the artist’s working procedures, such as the way an engraver builds up the design, his hatching patterns, the variations in inking and printing.”

Fellowships from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1995 and 1996 and the National Gallery of Art’s Robert H. Smith fund assisted in Fletcher’s ability to travel to examine Mantegna impressions in other collections. In 1997, she was awarded a prestigious Prix de Rome at the American Academy in Rome, affirming the importance of her work and saluting her expertise in the field of conservation and technical art history.

While researching Mantegna, Shelley co-organized a curatorial and conservation colloquy in 2000 focused on Antonio Pollaiuolo’s famous print Battle of the Nude Men, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Impressions were brought together from different collections across the United States to the National Gallery of Art. Curators and conservators from those institutions discussed the materiality, condition, and impression quality of the prints. Observations made at the workshop spawned further research by others into early engravings.

Shelley’s heralded 1998 volume Watermarks in Rembrandt’s Prints, coauthored with National Gallery of Art colleague Nancy Ash, set the standard for the identification of watermarks and their significance in the study of prints. The project was an immense undertaking and involved institutions from across the United States and Amsterdam. Shelley and Nancy organized the book by watermark design and included images of beta radiographs from actual impressions. Before this ambitious endeavor, the duo contributed a section on watermarks in the exhibition catalogue Rembrandt’s Landscapes: Drawings and Prints (1990).

Shelley’s other notable presentations and publications include the study of Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, Edgar Degas’s pastels, James McNeill Whistler’s prints, and even nineteenth-century wallpaper. In 1988, she teamed up with National Gallery of Art colleagues Pia DeSantis Pell and Sarah Fisher to translate into English Denis Rouart’s important text Degas: In Search of His Technique, which describes the artist’s working methods in many media. This translation has become invaluable for those trying to fathom Degas’s complex techniques.

As Department Head at the National Gallery of Art, Shelley guided paper conservation and made her and her colleagues strong advocates for the preservation of works of art. She fought adamantly for the reduced display of the Matisse cut-outs to protect their already-faded collage elements. Always emphasizing collection preservation, her department improved the display of works of art, in particular bound volumes, not always to the exhibition designer’s liking. When faced with responsibility for the care of photographic works of art, Shelley recognized the need for specialized expertise. Among her lasting contributions was the hiring of the museum’s first staff photograph conservator, Constance McCabe, who before then was a contractor. Photograph conservation later became an independent department that is an important advocate for the care and study of the National Gallery of Art’s growing collection of photographs.

Conservator Margaret Ellis summarized Shelley’s career most eloquently when introducing her as the 2019 Institute of Fine Arts commencement speaker: 

Perhaps even more impactful than Shelley’s scholarship is the powerful influence of a life led by example. Thanks to her commitment to education and training, there exists a strong tradition of mentoring interns and postgraduate fellows at the National Gallery—today her department is on every young paper conservator’s wish list as a host destination. Given this occasion, it seems right to salute Shelley for her pursuit of excellence throughout her career—something she demanded of herself and expected in return from everyone around her.