Merrill was instrumental in bringing scientific analysis to the arts. In 1977 Merrill discovered that a 15th-16th century painting attributed to German artist Mattias Grunewal owned by the Cleveland museum and had paid over $1 million was a modern forgery. Merrill discovered the fake through pigment analysis
The WP reports
To read the complete obituary on Ross Merrill click HERE."Someone showed up with a damaged painting," he told The Post, "and I fixed it for him, simple as that."
Mr. Merrill later trained to be an art conservator and began a career that brought him to Washington in 1981 as the head conservator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art. Two years later, he became the museum's chief of conservation and built the department into one of the most respected groups of its kind in the world.
"What he did was amazing," Mervin Richard, Mr. Merrill's successor at the National Gallery, said last week. "He's one of the great conservators of the 20th century."
Mr. Merrill, who was 67 when he died Dec. 15 of multiple myeloma, at his home in the Mount Vernon section of Fairfax County, led the conservation department for 26 years.
In that time, he expanded the staff from 15 people to 55, with different groups specializing in the preservation and repair of paintings photographs, textiles, works on paper, sculptures and other objects. He also established a research department that made science a central part of the museum's efforts to understand the secrets of art.
Mr. Merrill spent much of his time managing his growing department, but few people had his expertise when examining the finer points of a painting. In 1995, he concluded that a 17th-century painting in the National Gallery's collection was not the masterpiece it was thought to have been. After a close analysis of paint chemistry and the weave of the canvas, he determined that the painting long attributed to Nicolas Poussin was, in fact, by another artist copying the French master's style.
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