A pioneer in the fields of Northern Renaissance art and infrared reflectography, Molly Faries passed away from cancer on June 11, 2025 at home in Bloomington, Indiana at the age of 84. Eileen Fry, her wife of almost fifty years, was with her.
Born in Owosso, Michigan, in 1940, Molly Faries studied at The College of Wooster and the University of Michigan. She completed her Ph.D. in art history at Bryn Mawr College in 1972. With James Snyder as her adviser, Molly wrote her dissertation on the sixteenth-century North-Netherlandish painter Jan van Scorel, whose life and works remained the principal focus of her research. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship in the late 1960s, Molly pursued her research in the Netherlands, where she first became acquainted with infrared reflectography (IRR), which Dutch physicist J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer had just invented. Able to penetrate a picture’s paint layers, this imaging system reveals the underdrawing, the artist’s first compositional layout on the support. Molly’s annual visits to the Netherlands gradually made this country her second home, where she forged enduring friendships with colleagues at major institutions, in particular at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. With Van Asperen de Boer she embarked on a large-scale study of Scorel’s paintings with IRR, which resulted in a book-length essay on the painter’s creative process, published in the 1975 Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. Over the arc of her career, Molly researched and wrote over thirty-five publications about Scorel, including exhibition catalogues.
In 1975, Molly Faries joined the faculty of Indiana University, where she would eventually become Full Professor and teach until 2004. As federal agencies were not funding scientific equipment for researchers in the humanities, she arranged –after obtaining tenure– for the university to purchase its own IRR equipment, which she used for research and teaching, the first university professor to do so in the United States. From 1998 to 2005, she was also Professor and Chair of Technical Studies in Art History at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
“Technical art history”—the term often used to describe Molly’s field of inquiry—arguably does not do justice to the scope of her research or to its far-reaching implications. A few examples will make this point. Because so few drawings survive from the fifteenth century (and those that do are difficult to attribute to specific locales), Molly’s systematic examination of early Netherlandish, German, and French painting with infrared reflectography has established a new geography of graphic styles. Thanks to her studies, we now know, for instance, how graphic styles evolved in Cologne throughout the fifteenth century. In her study published jointly with Van Asperen de Boer of Jan van Eyck’s Rolin Madonna, she offered insight into the painter’s relationship with his patron. She suggests that Nicolas Rolin saw the painting during its creation and instructed Van Eyck to show the Christ Child blessing him and to hide the money bag that was hanging from his belt in the underdrawing. Molly also proved what many art historians had long suspected, namely that Hans Memling had been a member of Rogier van der Weyden’s workshop. She revealed that the underdrawing of Memling’s early works, especially his Last Judgment in Gdansk, contains several of Rogier’s graphic idiosyncrasies. Another defining characteristic of Molly’s work in the field, in her study of both Scorel and other artists, was her investigation of workshops, in particular the strategies and procedures painters pursued to manage their shops and organize artistic production. These examples are just a few illustrations of how Molly’s work has transformed our understanding of Northern Renaissance art.
In the course of my studies and professional career, I have been fortunate to meet a number of individuals who have shared with me their expertise. Among these mentors, Molly was by far the most generous and influential. She always pushed me to think further, shared her encyclopedic knowledge, and drove hours if not days to examine yet another painting relevant to the research of one of her students. By securing a six-year grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, matched by Indiana University, she allowed art history students, myself included, to base their dissertation research on the findings of reflectography. Instead of going on vacation, she spent every summer for several years introducing art historians and conservators to infrared reflectography in workshops in American and European museums. Many professionals in the field of Northern Renaissance art have had the privilege of working with her in front of paintings. It is a comfort to us who mourn Molly’s loss to know that her legacy is being passed on to later generations by those who in the last forty years were her students.
At a time when the worlds of museums and academe in America and Europe were perceived as drifting apart, Molly Faries built bridges. With grant support, she transported Indiana University’s IRR equipment for the systematic study of paintings in North America and Europe, most notably to the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1981-82), which published her reflectogram assemblies in the catalogue of early Netherlandish painting (1986) by John O. Hand and Martha Wolff. Although this practice is now routine in museums worldwide, this systematic catalogue was the first where reflectograms were published alongside the paintings. From 1984 to 1987 she undertook an IRR survey of paintings in Midwestern museums. There were many campaigns in Europe as well, first in the Netherlands, but also in Belgium, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Poland. Molly spoke the language of conservators and museum scientists, and she considered them prime interlocutors, whose findings were of crucial importance to art history. She often published with them, and in 1995 the College Art Association and National Institute for Conservation singled out her work with the Joint Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation. Molly imparted the importance of this dialogue between academics and museum professionals to her many students.
Molly’s generosity benefitted her beloved Netherlands. Her infrared reflectography and research archive—the results of decades of research—is now accessible at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) at The Hague, alongside that of Van Asperen de Boer. In the 1980s, Molly acquired an oblong landscape at auction in London. She kept this late work by Jan van Scorel in her home in Bloomington for many years before donating it to the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, where it has rejoined the largest ensemble of paintings by that artist. Molly’s legacy endures also in the minds and work of those who were fortunate to have her as a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. For us, her death is a momentous turning of the page, a time of profound sadness but also of gratitude for her life of inquiry and unflagging pursuit of knowledge.
Julien Chapuis
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (retired)