James Buford Roth

James “Jimmy” Buford Roth was born in 1910 in California, Missouri. He came to Kansas City in the late 1920s to enroll in the Fine Arts Department of the Kansas City Art Institute. He was hired along with many other Art Institute students to work as guards at the newly opened Nelson Gallery of Art in 1933, and eventually his duties expanded into assisting preparator George Herrick and helping out with new educational programs.

While at the museum, Roth met Marcel Jules Rougeron, a New York painting conservator who was on site to restore new acquisitions, and Roth began acting as his assistant. He quickly grew fascinated with the field of conservation, studying everything he could on the topic. In 1938, he received a Carnegie grant to attend summer courses at the Fogg Art Museum’s Conservation and Technical Research Department at Harvard University, the only school to offer instruction in restoration in the United States at the time. Roth returned to the museum and established the Restoration and Conservation Department, which he managed for more than forty years (except for a brief leave during World War II).

Many other museums and private collectors hired Roth to work on the restoration of their works by artists such as Titian, Vincent Van Gogh, George Caleb Bingham, Francisco Goya, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. His clients included the City Art Museum (present-day Saint Louis Museum of Art), the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, Princeton University and Nelson Rockefeller.

Roth’s work as a conservator intensely analyzed and deconstructed works of art from a broad array of periods and cultures that directly informed his own work as an artist. He often referenced the techniques of the Old Masters, especially their processes in obtaining pure colors from earthen pigments. As a result, he grounded his own pigments and utilized a resin and oil base similar to Leonardo Da Vinci's, while also constructing his own canvases and frames.

Roth continued to paint and sketch over his career as a conservator and lecturer, his subject matter ranging from scenery to portraiture. In addition to the conservation commissions he undertook for museums and clients across the country, Roth often received many commissions for his own work as a painter.

In 1973, Roth retired from his long-time role at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and moved to the Lake of the Ozarks, where he continued to sketch and paint. He died in 1990 at the age of eighty in California, Missouri.