Herbert Maryon

Personal life

Herbert Maryon was the third of six surviving children born to John Simeon Maryon and Louisa Maryon (née Church). He had both an older brother, John Ernest, and an older sister, Louisa Edith, the latter of whom preceded him in his vocation as a sculptor. One brother and three sisters would follow—in order, George Christian, Flora Mabel, Mildred Jessie, and Violet Mary—although Flora Maryon, born in 1878, would die in her second year. After receiving his general education at The Lower School of John Lyon, Herbert Maryon studied from 1896 to 1900 at the Polytechnic (probably Regent Street), The Slade, Saint Martin's School of Art, and, under the tutelage of Alexander Fisher, the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

A daughter, Kathleen Rotha Maryon, was born to his first wife Annie Elizabeth Maryon (née Stones), to whom he was married from July 1903 until her death on 8 February 1908. A second Marriage, to Muriel Dore Wood in September 1920, led to the births of son John and daughter Margaret. Herbert Maryon lived for the majority of his life in London, before dying in his 92nd year at a nursing home in Edinburgh.

British Museum, 1944–62

On 11 November 1944 Maryon was recruited out of retirement by the Trustees of the British Museum to serve as a Technical Attaché. Maryon was tasked with the conservation and reconstruction of material from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, an excavation in which he had previously expressed interest; as early as 1941, he wrote a prescient letter about the preservation of the ship impression to the museum's Keeper of British and Medieval Antiquities. Nearly four years after his letter, he was assigned "the real headaches - notably the crushed shield, helmet and drinking horns." Composed in large part of iron, wood and horn, these items had decayed in the 1,300 years since their burial and left only fragments behind; the helmet, for one, had corroded and then smashed into more than 500 pieces. "[M]inute work requiring acute observation and great patience," these efforts occupied several years of Maryon's career. Much of Maryon's work has seen subsequent revision, "but by carrying out the initial cleaning, sorting, and mounting of the mass of the fragmentary and fragile material he preserved it, and in working out out his reconstructions he made explicit the problems posed and laid the foundations upon which fresh appraisals and progress could be based when fuller archaeological study became possible." In 1949 Maryon was admitted as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and in 1956 his Sutton Hoo work "brought him his O.B.E." Maryon continued restoration work at the British Museum, including on a Roman helmet found in Homs, before retiring—for a second time—at the age of 87.

The Sutton Hoo helmet

From 1946 to 1947, Maryon undertook the first restoration of the fragmented Sutton Hoo helmet, then "the only known example of a decorated Anglo-Saxon helmet." Maryon's work was "generally acclaimed," and both academically and culturally influential. It stayed on display for over 20 years, with photographs making their way television programmes, newspapers, and "every book on Anglo-Saxon art and archaeology"; in 1951 a young Larry Burrows was dispatched to the British Museum by Life, which subsequently published a full page photograph of the helmet alongside a photo of Maryon. Over the "fifteen years since Maryon's time conservation techniques and scientific possibilities . . . advanced dramatically," however, while "greater knowledge about Saxon and Vendel helmets became available" and limitations of Maryon's reconstruction—notably its diminished size, gaps in afforded protection, and lack of a moveable neck guard—became apparent; so too were more helmet fragments discovered during the 1965–69 re-excavation of Sutton Hoo. In 1970 it was "taken to pieces for re-examination," and after eighteen months a second restoration completed. Nevertheless, "[m]uch of Maryon's work is valid. The general character of the helmet was made plain." Just as minor errors in the second reconstruction were discovered while forging the 1973 Royal Armouries replica, "[i]t was only because there was a first restoration that could be constructively criticized, that there was the impetus and improved ideas available for a second restoration." In executing a first reconstruction that was "physically reversible" and retained evidence through the "limited . . . cleaning of the mineralized iron fragments," Maryon's true contribution to the Sutton Hoo helmet was in creating a credible first rendering that allowed for the critical examination leading to the second, current, reconstruction. As Rupert Bruce-Mitford, then Assistant Keeper of the Department of British Antiquities at the British Museum, wrote in 1947, "[a]rchaeology is indebted in Mr. Maryon for re-creating the helmet out of hundreds of crumbly fragments, most of which were unintelligible without prolonged and careful study."

Though "[o]ne of the most important objects found" in "the richest find ever made on British soil," the fragmentary state of the Sutton Hoo helmet caused it to go at first unnoticed. "No photographs had been taken of [the fragments] during excavation as their importance had not been realized at the time." The excavation diary of Charles Phillips merely mentioned that on 28 July 1939 "crushed remains of an iron helmet were found four feet east of the shield boss on the north side of the central deposit"; whereas photographs of the shield in situ allowed "Dr Plenderleith to pick out from among the fragments of bronze and iron those pieces which made up the shield-grip," no such contextual evidence survived for the helmet. Stalled for six years by World War II, when it reached Maryon's workbench in 1945 the "task of restoration was thus reduced to a jigsaw puzzle without any sort of picture on the lid of the box," and, "as it proved, a great many of the pieces missing." Maryon was left to base his reconstruction "exclusively on the information provided by the surviving fragments, guided by archaeological knowledge of other helmets."

Maryon's "[w]ork on the helmet was full-time and continuous and took six months." Much like with the second reconstruction, efforts began with a "process of familiarisation" with the various fragments; each piece was traced and detailed on a "piece of stiff card," until after "a long while" reconstruction could commence. For this, Maryon formed "a head of normal size" from plaster, then "padded the head out above the brows to allow for the thickness of the lining which a metal helmet would naturally require." The fragments of the skull cap were then initially stuck to the head with plasticine, or, if thicker, placed into spaces cut into the head. Finally, "strong white plaster" was used to permanently affix the fragments, and, mixed with brown umber, fill in the gaps between pieces. Meanwhile, the fragments of the cheek guards, neck guard, and visor were placed onto shaped, plaster-covered wire mesh, then affixed with more plaster and joined to the cap. The reconstruction finished, Maryon published a paper detailing the helmet in a 1947 issue of Antiquity.

Along with giving shape to the first decorated helmet found from the Anglo-Saxon period, Maryon's reconstruction correctly identified both the five designs depicted on its exterior, and the helmet's method of construction. The helmet was made of sheet iron, then "covered with sheets of very thin tinned bronze, stamped with patterns, and arranged in panels." The patterns were formed from dies carved in relief, while the panels were "framed by lengths of moulding . . . swaged from strips of tin," themselves "fixed in place by bronze rivets," and gilded. Meanwhile, "the free edges of the helmet were protected by a U-shaped channel of gilt bronze, clamped on, and held in position by narrow gilt bronze ties, riveted on." Although likely not more than "educated guess[es]," Maryon's statements were largely confirmed by scientific analysis carried out after completion of the second reconstruction.

Publications

Maryon published two books: Metalwork and Enamelling, still in publication in its fifth edition, and Modern Sculpture. He was additionally the author of chapters in volumes one and two of Charles Singer's A History of Technology series, and of some thirty archaeological and technical papers. Several of Maryon's earlier papers described his restorations of the shield and helmet from the Sutton Hoo burial, while a 1948 paper introduced the term pattern welding to describe a method of strengthening and decorating iron and steel by welding into them twisted strips of metal. Six years later, a paper on the Colossus of Rhodes received international attention for suggesting that the statue was hollow, and aside the harbor rather than astride it. Made of hammered bronze plates less than a sixteenth of an inch thick, he suggested, it would have been supported there by a hanging piece of drapery acting as a third point of support. If "great ideas," neither "proved to be truly convincing"; in 1957, D. E. L. Haynes, then the Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, suggested that Maryon's theory of hammered bronze plates relied on an errant translation of a primary source. Maryon's view was nevertheless influential, likely shaping Salvador Dalí's 1954 surrealist imagining of the statue. "Not only the pose, but even the hammered plates of Maryon's theory find [in Dalí's painting] a clear and very powerful expression."