Obituary: Richard Lithgow FIIC ACR

We are very sorry to announce the sudden and unexpected death of Richard Lithgow on Monday 9 October 2023.  Richard was an accredited conservation professional with over forty years’ experience conserving wall paintings and other painted surfaces of all periods and styles.  With Mark Perry ACR, Richard has been a Director of the Perry Lithgow Partnership since 1983 and a Trustee of the Eve Baker Trust, maintaining the extensive archive of conservation work carried out by the Eve Baker Trust from the 1950s to 1980s.

Perry Lithgow have completed more than 200 conservation projects in cathedrals, churches, and historic houses in all parts of the British Isles.  These projects are a roll call for many of the most significant buildings in this country, including Peterborough, Rochester and Chichester Cathedrals, St Alban’s Abbey and Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey, the Palace of Westminster, Kensington and Hampton Court Palaces and several Oxford Colleges.

In 2010 the Perry Lithgow Partnership were awarded the Pilgrim Trust Award for Conservation for their conservation work on the 18th-century staircase wall and ceiling paintings by Sir James Thornhill.  This project was presented at the IIC Congress in Vienna in 2012.   The Partnership has provided work experience and training for numerous wall and easel paintings conservators, many of whom are now leaders in the field.

He will be sorely missed by the whole conservation community and not least by his business partner Mark Perry ACR and his wife Katy Lithgow FIIC.

A fuller obituary will be published in the December-January Issue of "News in Conservation"