Tracey Albainy, was curator at Museum of Fine Arts; 45

Tracey Albainy with English silver masterworks from the Hartman collection, which was acquired during her tenure. (Museum of Fine Arts)

Sévres was her porcelain, champagne was her drink. Tracey Albainy had an eye for the exquisite, and as a senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, she brought her sensibility about decorative arts and sculpture to the museum's galleries.

"She was a remarkable mixture of so many extraordinary qualities," MFA director Malcolm Rogers said. "She was a great scholar, she was a wonderful connoisseur, and she had great people skills. They were not just skills, because she absolutely had a heart as well."

Ms. Albainy, 45, died Tuesday from complications of lung cancer.

"She just was remarkable at signaling the greatest thing and finding a perfect match to support that," said George T. M. Shackelford, who heads the museum's Art of Europe department. "And all of this with just impeccable elegance and charm that were matched in equal weight by intelligence and erudition. She was able to do that kind of seesaw between being a profound scholar and a incurable flirt."

While many she worked with championed masterpieces in the form of paintings, Ms. Albainy sought out the finest that the decorative art world had to offer. She had a particular affection for the over-the-top decadence of 18th-century Europe, and her enthusiasm for this period was legendary in art circles.

"It is rare to meet someone so consumed by passion for what she worked for everyday," said former colleague Peter Barnet, who now heads the department of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "She really was extraordinarily focused and hard-working, pleasant, and interested in what her colleagues were doing."

The museum's "Symbols of Power: Napoleon and the Art of the Empire Style, 1800-1815," exhibit was one of her more recent massive undertakings.

"By the time Napoleon became emperor in 1804, he had already begun to champion a bold, classical aesthetic that expressed grandeur and monumentality, a stark contrast to the very decorative neoclassicism of pre-Revolutionary France," she was quoted as saying in the museum's article about the exhibit. "The Empire style would become one of the grandest and most opulent in the history of decorative arts. Bold, saturated colors, costly and elaborately worked materials, and ornate decoration underline the splendor of Napoleon's court and of the arts in general under the empire."

That scholarly yet colorful quality stood out among colleagues.

"She was, above all, extraordinarily informed about a range of the decorative arts from the Middle Ages to the modern era, and more than any other curator I have ever known, she had an intelligent opinion about anything from 1300 or 1930," Shackelford said.

Ms. Albainy also had a knack for gracefully getting things from people in a somewhat indirect manner - especially financing for an exhibit.

"She would get everything accomplished and more - but in a most circuitous way," fellow MFA curator Ronni Baer said. "She would have you doing something for her but you wouldn't even know it."

And, "She just had a wicked wit - she would say something just slightly devilish, and then have this twinkle in her eye and you knew that she didn't mean it maliciously."

Gordon Hanlon, head of Furniture Conservation for the MFA, praised Ms. Albainy's penchant for bringing in "the most unbelievable acquisitions . . . just amazing things, especially silver and ceramics, and furniture. She was always doing that to keep me quiet - to keep me happy," he said.

She wrote prolifically about her passion, with articles published in Apollo magazine, The Silver Society Journal, The Burlington Magazine, and other journals. And she lectured far and wide on such topics as the impact of hunting - a common theme for silversmiths and ceramics factories in 18th-century Europe - on the tableware of the time.

Ms. Albainy grew up in Cleveland and earned her bachelor's degree in art history from Smith College in 1984, a master's in art history from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in 1987, and a master's in the history of European decorative arts from the Parsons School of Design in 1990. She worked for a time at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, followed by a stint at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama and the Detroit Institute of Arts before coming to Boston in 2000.

"Several people, whom I admired greatly, said she's the best in America - she's the best in every way," Rogers said of his decision to hire her. "I went to Detroit, and I then met a really charming, lovely, warm person."

Ms. Albainy is survived by her father, Miled Albainy of Cleveland; brothers Anthony and Donald, both of Cleveland; her sister Kelly Albainy-Jenei of Cincinnati; and several nieces and nephews.

A memorial service in Boston is being planned for next spring.