By Peter Monaghan

An art conservator who set up North America's first doctoral program in preservation studies, at the University of Delaware, has been named to a new chair in material culture, the study of societies' artifacts.

Joyce Hill Stoner's appointment adds heft to her research on the repair of paintings, allows her to continue preserving them herself, and gives her more say in teaching both the study and the craft of art conservation to her students.

Ms. Stoner's peers describe the 63-year-old conservator as prolific, and brilliant in conservatorship, research, and teaching, says Joann Browning, Delaware's associate dean for the arts.

After serving as head paintings conservator at the Winterthur Museum & Country Estate from 1976 to 1980, and leading the museum's entire conservation division from 1980 to 1982, Ms. Stoner directed the Winterthur-University of Delaware program in art conservation until 1997. The former estate of Henry Francis du Pont, Winterthur displays his collections of antiques and Americana. Delaware students use the museum's analytical laboratory and conservation studios.

In 1990, Ms. Stoner set up North America's first doctoral program in preservation studies at Delaware, even before she had completed her own Ph.D. (There are now two others, at New York University and the State University of New York College at Buffalo.) Her dissertation, for a Ph.D. in art history at NYU, discussed the techniques and materials James McNeill Whistler used for his paintings, lithographs, and decorative interiors, all of which Ms. Stoner treated as a conservator. She became a full professor of art conservation in 1996.

Since 2005, she has directed Delaware's preservation-studies doctoral program, which awards about 10 master's degrees and one or two doctorates a year. The department has six full-time faculty members, and conservators from Winterthur also teach courses. Dissertation supervisors come from several departments, including anthropology, chemistry, history, and historic preservation.

Ms. Stoner calls being a named professor "the best job in the world" because "you can pick your goals and pursue them like a bullet train."

For her, that means teaching, conserving paintings, studying issues in art preservation, and writing dozens of essays and book chapters on her craft. With a colleague, she is editing a 700-page volume, Conservation of Easel Paintings, due out in 2011. The chair also provides new travel funds, and requires Ms. Stoner to give a public lecture.

She rates among her proudest accomplishments her years as senior conservator for the meticulous restoration of Whistler's Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington between 1987 and 1992.

Another high point, she says, was her supervision of work in 1998 on "Apotheosis of the Family," a 19-by-60-foot mural by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) that enlivened the lobby of a bank in downtown Wilmington, Del.

But Ms. Stoner's greatest thrill, she says, was sitting for a portrait by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), after she became a conservator of the younger Wyeth's paintings. "I have shoulder-length red hair, which was a really good thing in Wyeth's world," she explains. The canvas hangs in her workshop at the Winterthur museum.

Ms. Stoner and her colleagues at Winterthur have used X-rays and other techniques to detect illustrations that N.C. Wyeth painted over.

She almost became an artist herself. After growing up in Chevy Chase, Md., she studied fine arts at the College of William and Mary. Guidance counselors there suggested she had just the right mix of skills for art conservation, then a little-studied field. She earned a master's degree from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts in 1970 and a diploma in conservation from the NYU Conservation Center three years later.

She painted for a while, but she tired of the need to sell herself constantly, and she began to concentrate on conservation.

"Sitting in front of an easel, with a painting, you're essentially doing what you would be doing if you were painting. It's creative in a different way. If a canvas is torn, it must be gently cleaned, and then lined up, thread by thread. Then you have to imitate the original brush strokes in a detailed way."

Ms. Stoner hopes she will reach more people by speaking than she can by treating paintings one by one.

Her goal? "To stop people from throwing out their torn paintings. And if I can get to the public and say 'Do not clean your paintings with Ajax,' I'll have done well."