Sarah Hillary on growing up with Sir Ed and leaving her 40-year career

As Sarah Hillary, the principal art conservator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, prepares to retire she talks to Hilary Barry about growing up with Sir Ed, a family tragedy, and her enduring passion for her work. Words: Emily Simpson

Being an art conservator sounds like a quiet, painstaking role, but if you do it for 40 years – as Sarah Hillary has – big stuff happens. You get interrupted by a gun-toting art thief, or help uncover a major forgery, or a pair of Manhattan-based billionaires drops off a bunch of works worth $190 million with signatures like Cezanne, Gauguin and Picasso.

But back to that gun-toting robber. It was 1998 when he terrorised the good art lovers of Auckland, threatening staff members, shooting at punters, ripping a 19th Century painting from a wall, smashing the glass to retrieve it from its frame and stuffing it in his backpack before riding away on his motorbike.

The painting was eventually retrieved but in a sorry state, the canvas slashed by broken glass, the once immaculate layers of paint peeling. “It was brutal,” says Hillary. A long period of tests, consultants and intricate work ensued. “We just worked slowly on it and luckily we had the luxury because there was insurance money,” she says. “You don’t want to rush conservation.”

Meanwhile the media was jumping up and down. “One of the biggest challenges was that everybody wanted to know what was happening at every minute,” says Hillary. “Conservation was thrown into the spotlight, from being in the backroom.”

Hillary might be at home in the backroom but as the daughter of one of the most famous figures in New Zealand history, she’s known the spotlight too. Or at least, being just to the left of it. “You do obviously have a very familiar name,” says Barry. “And I apologise in advance because I’m sure you have been asked a lot about your dad over the years... You had to share him from such a young age.”

“Well I suppose I grew up with it,” says Hillary. “So that was all I knew. I do remember as a young child I found it kind of annoying. But then also we were very privileged to have lots of adventures.”

She recalls amazing holidays overseas and, back home, fascinating visitors to the house. Her parents were deeply involved in the Himalayan Trust, and there was always someone at their place plotting to build a school or a hospital in Nepal. “It was exciting.”

But then... “Ed seemed to get more famous as he got older,” she says. “It was hard to get his attention even more then.”

Hillary was 18 and at university, toying with a few potential futures (pre-med, science, psychology) when her young life was interrupted by tragedy. In 1975, a plane carrying her mother Louise and 16-year-old sister Belinda crashed soon after take-off from Kathmandu.

“We had a major disaster in my family with my mother and sister dying, and that sort of threw me for a while,” Hillary tells Barry.

“Eventually when I did go back to university, I decided to do art history.”

Barry points out that Hillary’s original goal to be a doctor seems to fit with what she ultimately came to do. There’s “something quite surgical” in Hillary’s tender precision with art works, she points out. Hillary agrees the conservation lab is both “an operating theatre of sorts” and a research lab. The microscopic analysis of both paint and brushstroke can provide searing insights into an artist’s technique. And it can expose forgeries.

Take the painting, once thought to be a Lindauer, purchased by the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington in 2013 for $75,000. Portrait of a Maori man named as Hoani or Hamiora Maioha bore the Gottfried Lindauer signature, but some people doubted it really was the work of the Czech-born portraitist famous for his depiction of Māori. So when the Auckland gallery was planning a big Lindauer show in 2016 they decided to take a closer look.

They used infrared photography to penetrate the paint layers and highlight the pencil under-drawing of the work. Lindauer used a very distinct three-dimensional approach to his under-drawings, and whoever painted this work didn't share it.

But that wasn’t all. Any suspicion that the painting was a fraud was confirmed when Hillary and her crew took a cross-section of its layers.

“The ground layer – underlying the canvas – had a pigment that wasn’t available in Lindauer’s lifetime,” she says. A eureka moment for the forensics at Toi o Tāmaki, if lousy news for the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Of course being a conservator is not all dealing with the fall-out from crooks and frauds. There are 15,000 works of art in Toi o Tāmaki and, according to Hillary, they’re all loved and treated with equal care, regardless of their official value.

She points to a pleasant pastoral scene of a cow in a meadow. It’s a Paul Gauguin, worth millions, part of the whopping donation to the gallery by those billionaires. How would she begin to remove a layer of discoloured varnish from such an old and valuable object, as she once did, without losing her mind?

“You keep those values out of your head,” she says. “It’s not important. What’s important is doing the best job.”

And the best job she’s done. For four decades. Now, Hillary has a busy “retirement” to embrace. An artist herself, she has an exhibition planned and a book in the works. She’s also carrying on the family’s work with the Himalayan Trust.

Still, 40 years is a long time. “I feel very sad,” she admits. “But it’s been such a wonderful career. I feel very lucky.”