art conservator fall 2014

Williamstown Art Conservation Center | 1

A P U B L I C A T I O N O F T H E W I L L I A M S T O W N A R T C O N S E R V A T I O N C E N T E R V O L U M E 9 , N U M B E R 2 • F A L L 2 0 1 4

Oldenburg’s Soft Fan

2 | Art Conservator | Fall 2014 Williamstown Art Conservation Center | 3

Contents, Fall 2014

Art ConservatorVolume 9, Number 2 • Fall 2014

Director

T homas J. Branchick

Editor

Timothy Cahill

Art Direction and Production

Ed Atkeson/Berg Design

Photographer

Matthew Hamilton

Contributors

Graham C. Boettcher,

Melissa Horn,

Christine Puza,

Sandra Webber

Proofreader

David Brickman

Office Manager

Rob Conzett

Accounts Manager

Teresa Haskins

Printing

Snyder Printer, Troy, NY

Williamstown Art Conservation Center 227 South Street

Williamstown, MA 01267

www.williamstownart.org

T: 413-458-5741

F: 413-458-2314

Atlanta Art Conservation Center 6000 Peachtree Road

Atlanta, GA 30341

T: 404-733-4589

F: 678-547-1453

All rights reserved. Text and photographs

copyright © Williamstown Art Conservation

Center (WACC), unless otherwise noted.

Art Conservator is published twice yearly

by WACC, T homas J. Branchick, director.

Material may not be reproduced in any form

without written permission of Williamstown

Art Conservation Center. WACC is a

nonprofit, multi-service conservation center

serving the needs of member museums,

nonprofit institutions and laboratories, and

the general public.

From the Director

On the coverX-ray image revealing construction of Claes Oldenburg’s

1965 Model for Soft Fan.

3 Director’s Letter

4 When the Grit Hits the Fan

Claes Oldenburg, Pop, and the conservation of the everyday By Melissa Horn

8 Links to the Past

History and lore meet in a model of Shinnecock Hills Golf Course Christine Puza

10 Burchfield’s Landscape Mysticism

12 WACC News & Notes

William Sidney Mount’s Eel Spearing; Bryant’s homestead wallpaper; Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat

16 Report from Atlanta

Dramatic measures save portrait by the “Artist of the Confederacy” By Graham C. Boettcher

19 Tech Notes

Colormen and their Marks Sandra Webber

After more than ten years of planning and construction, the Clark Art Institute’s major new Clark Center has opened and it is sensational. The new addition is a companion to our home here in the (recently renamed) Lunder Center at Stone Hill, both being the creation of Japanese master architect Tadao Ando. Clark Center includes new visitor facilities, a pair of excellent temporary exhibition galleries, and an elegant, multi-tiered reflecting pool that mirrors the hills and sky of our Berkshire landscape. The paintings of the permanent collection, many of which were on national tour, have been returned to the reconfigured galleries of the original building, and I get great satisfaction in seeing old friends (many of which I personally treated) back home. Among the inaugural exhibits was Make It

New: Abstract Paintings from the National Gallery of Art: 1950-1975, brilliantly installed in the glorious new subterranean gallery. The presence at the Clark of Pollack, Rothko, and other major American abstractionists sent a powerful signal that a new day had dawned at the venerable museum.

With a major retrospective of Paul Feely’s paintings opening this November at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, I spent the summer preparing more than a dozen of the artist’s large abstract canvases. Curious visitors asked what I was doing outside the Center in shorts, tee shirt, and wet sandals, readying the paintings for display with de-ionized water and sunshine. “You can do that and it works?” they asked. Yes it does, if you know the secret. This issue of Art Conservator features the maquette for Claes Oldenberg’s Soft Fan sculptures — a historically significant piece of early Pop art. The X-ray of the piece’s blade assembly makes a very graphic cover photo. The treatment was a team effort, involving conservators from two departments working with our Lenett fellow from Williams College. It was one of our most interesting projects for the annual Judith M. Lenett Memorial Fellowship, which celebrates its twentieth year at WACC. We are extremely proud to offer this educational opportunity with Williams College and the Clark, and pleased to carry forward the legacy and memory of Judith Lenett in such a worthy manner. —Tom Branchick

WACC director Thomas Branchick in shorts and sandals treating the large canvases of Paul Feeley under the summer sun.


Imagine this: you walk into a museum and see a sculpture on a pedestal— Model for Soft Fan, the label says, from 1965, by the artist Claes Oldenburg. It depicts an

oscillating fan, with the usual blades, head, and body, but it looks broken. In fact, it looks beyond broken: it seems defeated, demoralized, crushed. But of course, it’s supposed to be that way. Oldenburg worked during the 1960s, when a playful new breed of Pop artists pulled, stretched, and broke everyday objects to subvert and expand what we call art. The drooping fan’s broken appearance was part of the work’s artistic argument: it was, in other words, intentional.

Now imagine you walk into an art conservation lab and see the same fan. You know the work is there because it needs treatment—it must be broken. But wait. Doesn’t Oldenburg play with brokenness? How do you know which parts need fixing? If an artist meant for a piece to look damaged or distorted, what does it mean to repair it?

In the conservation lab, such theoretical quandaries about an artist’s intention take on a practical urgency. These sorts of questions were, indeed, exactly what entered my mind when I first encountered Oldenburg’s Model for Soft Fan at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center.

The work is a maquette, a kind of three-dimensional sketch, for two much larger works from 1967, called Giant Soft Fan and Giant Soft Fan, Ghost Version. There are a lot of differences between the maquette and the finished works. Our fan—the model, owned by the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts—is approximately two feet high. The finished versions are ten feet high. Our fan is mostly

paper and cardboard. The larger fans are predominantly vinyl. Maybe most significantly for conservation purposes, the finished versions hang by a chain from the ceiling, whereas our piece is adhered to a base.

Yet, curiously, at one point our model was more similar to the final work than when it came to us. In the object file for the fan, with past conservation reports and records of ownership, we received an odd photograph of our maquette hanging from a wall, tipped over backwards. We could only guess at why it was exhibited this way. Did it fall over when it was upright and just look better hung up? Or did the previous owner know something about Oldenburg’s intention that we didn’t? Regardless of the reason, it was clear to the curators at Smith that gravity wasn’t doing the model any favors.

When the college museum accessioned the piece in 1979, it was in danger of being ripped off its base by own weight. In response to this threat, Smith curators had the work conserved at another lab in the early 1980s. There, conservators performed major repairs to return the piece to its standing position. Over the intervening three decades, however, the fan had slumped forward again. The main aim of our treatment was to stabilize the structural integrity of the piece, to reverse the fan’s forward slump and help prevent it from sagging in the future.

A second major task was both cosmetic and chemical. The piece was covered with a mysterious, dust-like white coating. On closer inspection, the coating proved to be a chemical efflorescence that had bloomed out from the paint itself. This was the first issue I addressed. Because the maquette is made

Cover Story

When the Grit Hits the FanClaes Oldenburg, Pop, and the conservation of the everydayBy Melissa Horn

Claes Oldenburg, Model for Soft Fan, 1965, after treatment.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Judith M. Lenett Memorial Fellowship, a joint project of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, Williams College, and The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Each academic year, the Lenett Fellowship is awarded to a second-year student in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, to explore issues of art conservation in the field of American art. Working closely with WACC conservators, each fellow spends two semesters conserving and researching an American art object. This year’s Lenett Fellow, Melissa Horn, worked on Model for Soft Fan by Claes Oldenburg, under the guidance of Leslie Paisley, WACC head paper conservator, and Hélène Gillette-Woodard, head objects conservator. The project culminated in a public lecture by Ms. Horn at the Clark. The article below is adapted from that presentation. The full text of the original lecture is available at www.williamstownart.org.


electrical tape that covers parts of the fan, are disastrous from a conservation standpoint. Plastics constitute a huge area of research in the conservation of modern and contemporary art, as artists used plastics with increasing frequency into the twentieth-century and our own. “Plastic” is a single word used to describe thousands of different types of synthetic compounds, each of which can respond differently to aging. Artworks made from plastic might warp, crack, become soft and sticky, or crumble into powder. Plastic artifacts and works of art aren’t just dangers to themselves, but to things around them: the gases certain compounds give off as they degrade can, for instance, corrode metal.

I cleaned the bloom with a fluffy brush made from goat hair, working in broad, round strokes to gently dislodge the majority of the powder, which I then vacuumed off. Because it was crystallized oil, the bloom made the brush feel thick and greasy, like dog fur. Using a variety of brush shapes and sizes with stiff bristles to navigate the work’s small crannies, I worked my way into the cardboard’s corrugated ridges, underneath the nails at the front and back of the plywood base, and along the long, thin folds in the fan’s body.

Though I removed all the white particulates, we can’t know whether the paint is finished weeping stearic acid or if the bloom will reappear. Only time will tell if the sculpture will need to be cleaned of its fatty acids again in the future.

By this time, the fan and I had spent several weeks spent together in the lab. We had gotten to know each other pretty well, and after a while I started to think of “it” as a “him.” I felt a kind of sympathy: he had had a rough life, and even besides the efflorescence and the mechanical problems, he had the pathetic air of a sad sack, Willy Loman-type character. It was clear that in repairing the fan we needed to preserve its personality. To my

mind, it was definitely Oldenburg’s intention that the fan never look too perky.

What did the X-rays tell us about the fan’s structural weaknesses? Because of how the piece was slumped over, the weak spot appeared to be at the neck, but in truth it was in the joint where the blades met the head. The cross-shaped piece of metal from the previous treatment was very thin, more like foil. Over time, it had flexed and caused the slumping. We needed to figure out another way to support the blades.

Working now with Hélène Gillette-Woodard, head of the WACC objects lab, we decided on two options for the structural treatment. The first involved contracting an external mount maker to fabricate a thin piece of metal that would be

permanently attached to the piece’s pedestal. The top of this brace would be soldered to two horseshoe-shaped pieces of metal that would hold up the blades through a slight compression. This solution would be minimally invasive to the piece, which was a benefit, but it would also be quite visible to viewers.

In option two, we would fabricate a new aluminum cross-shaped support, the same shape as the earlier piece, but thicker and stronger. This cross-shaped insert would be totally hidden from sight and blend in with the piece. We would still contract an external mount maker to fabricate supports for the blades made of curved metal, which would be attached with a nut directly to the new cross support. The mount would be much smaller and less visible, but we would have to dismantle the artwork to install it, a much more invasive treatment. The more invasive a procedure, the more inherent the risk that something might go wrong. Smith College chose this option anyway, for, despite being more risky, it would provide the best support for the piece in the long run.

Hélène unwrapped Oldenburg’s original wire from one of the

primarily of paper elements, I worked with Leslie Paisley, head of the WACC paper lab. She and I tackled the efflorescence.

Before beginning the treatment, we analyzed the sculpture to understand how Oldenburg had fit all the elements together. The fan’s base is constructed of a brown kraft-paper bag, turned upside down and stapled to a cardboard ring. Oldenburg then opened the bottom of a second bag to make a cylinder and placed a circle of cardboard on either end of the tube to form a kind of drum. Stapled shut, this construction formed the head or motor housing of the maquette. To make the fan blades, Oldenburg stapled four cardboard ovoids to a central cross-shaped piece of cardboard. Finally, the loopy shape that encircles the work represents the fan’s electrical cord and is made from bits of clothesline held together by electrical tape.

X-ray photography revealed that Oldenburg attached the blades to the head by running a wire through both elements, which he secured by wrapping around a nail on each side to pull the wire taut. The X-ray also exposed a bright cross shape attached to the blade construction and concealed by cardboard and electrical tape; this turned out to be a metal insert created by the previous conservators to give the blades added support.

Inspection revealed a second main element of that previous treatment as well: additional internal support for the paper bag that forms the fan’s base. The conservators had lined the original bag with canvas to stiffen and protect the brittle kraft paper; they then filled the cavity with polyethylene micro-beads, which are like tiny packing peanuts, giving the internal bag more mass and greater support in its upright position.

Now that we understood how the sculpture was made, we turned to cleaning the white efflorescence. An efflorescence is the dried remnants of a substance that has lost it moisture; in this case, it was clearly something associated with the model’s paint layer. The pattern of the bloom precisely followed the original drip pattern of the paint. A detail photograph of one area showed how the material crystallized on top of the paint layer, thin in some places, but very thick in others, like little piles of snow.

Analysis suggested that the crystalized material was stearic acid, a saturated fat found in cocoa butter and shea butter. What was this compound doing on the surface of our sculpture? Interestingly, research revealed that ours was not the only Oldenburg to have developed this kind of bloom. In 2009, a sculpture called Floor Cake made of painted canvas showed the same powdery efflorescence on the cake’s chocolate drop. Both our sculpture and the chocolate drop were painted with an oil-based paint containing synthetic stearic acid. The powdery efflorescence on these works is the result of the stearic acid migrating out of the paint and crystallizing on the surface of the sculpture.

(There is an irony to this efflorescence appearing on the cake sculpture’s chocolate drop. The same thing happens to the fat in actual chocolate as well, as anyone knows who has opened an old bag of chocolate chips and found they have turned all weird and white. This phenomenon is called chocolate bloom, and it’s basically the same process: the cocoa fat migrates out of the chocolate compound it had been a part of and appears on the surface.)

Alkyd resin paints like the one on Model for Soft Fan were manufactured as inexpensive paint for artists, but they were also formulated as house paint. In fact, pretty much every material in the maquette could have been purchased in a hardware store. Oldenburg chose to work with common materials manufactured to be inexpensive rather than last a long time. This choice has had dire effects on the longevity of his work. The phrase conservators use to describe a material that deteriorates due to internal, intrinsic factors (as opposed to external forces) is “inherent vice.” Very often, artists don’t realize that a material is inherently unstable. Most of the materials in the fan maquette possessed this problem.

Kraft paper bags, for example, like the ones Oldenburg used, are made from ground wood pulp, which contains high amounts of a compound called lignin. Lignin is acidic and over time makes paper brittle and dark (think of old newspapers). Corrugated cardboard is similarly acidic. Plastics, like the continued on page 18

Lenett fellow Melissa Horn in the WACC objects department.

Detail of stearic acid “bloom” caused by crystallized fats in the oil-based paint.


Feature

T o golf aficionados, the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, New York, is one of the world’s legendary venues. Built on the edge of Long Island Sound, it is a

traditional old links course of tall grass and stiff winds, and has been the site of the prestigious U.S. Open four times across three centuries. The club’s Stanford White-designed clubhouse was built in 1892 and its first twelve-hole course laid out in 1895.

Shinnecock Hills was completely redesigned into a modern eighteen-hole course in 1931, but it is still possible to survey the original layout thanks to a topographical scale model that has preserved its charm and romance. The grand three-dimensional plaster map measures twelve feet by seven feet, and captures the fairways, hazards, greens, and surrounding geography of the “National Golf Links of America” as they appeared in 1911.

For decades the model had decorated the stately clubhouse, until that building was renovated in 1991 and the old map moved to an outbuilding for storage. By then, it had lost much of its original power to conjure the past. At some point in its life, it

had suffered severe damage at the midpoint of the lower portion, which had been repaired with a rough layer of commercial plaster. Thickly applied over the map’s central shoreline, this repair covered the boundary between land and sea. Layers of repainting had also taken away much of the model’s original luster.

Adding to the map’s historic importance is the identity of its maker, Edwin E. Howell (1847- 1911). An early geographer with the United States Geographical Service, Howell is believed to have originated the concept of the topographical model as a teaching tool in 1871 with a plaster map of the island of Santo Domingo. In 1876, his relief map of the Grand Canyon was prominently featured at the U.S. Centennial exposition in Philadelphia, and he was honored at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis with a retrospective exhibit of fifty-six models. Shinnecock Hills was his last work, completed shortly before his death.

The treatment began with cross-sectional analysis of the overpaint found present on nearly all surfaces. Examination

Links to the PastHistory and lore meet in a model of Shinnecock Hills Golf Courseby Christine Puza Assistant Conservator of Furniture and Wood Objects

revealed at least four layers of added paint on the surrounding green, non-relief regions, and three distinct layers covering the water. The wooden frame was also heavily overpainted with black and white commercial paints.

The removal of these later paint layers to reveal the original surface comprised the majority of the treatment.

Removing the overpaint also allowed the extent of the damage present on the lower portion to be evaluated. Except for the main area of damage, the original surface was intact and stable. Work on the area of the previous repair, particularly in the central part of the water, revealed that most of the original surface comprising the bay had been lost. Nearly all of Howell’s elaborate hand lettering was also missing, except for a few fragments on the far right and left.

Fortunately, Shinnecock Hills had in its records a photograph of the model, taken around the time it was made, that clearly showed what the damaged legend had looked like. The photograph was scanned and projected onto the surface of the model, using the fragments of the original lettering for registration. In this way it was possible to achieve the correct size and orientation to accurately restore the missing text. The few original letters that remained retained their color scheme of black, white, and several shades of blue, and these intact regions were referenced to aid in accurate color matching. This projection technique was also used to recreate the shoreline where it had been replaced by the thick, obtrusive fill.

One of the treatment’s most engaging aspects was the replication of missing foliage and trees. Taking direct cues from what remained of the original trees, as well as applying techniques used in model train landscapes, small bundles of fine-gauge copper wire were twisted together, cut into lengths, then partially untwisted on one end to form a tree shape. The leaves of the trees were made of finely chopped sphagnum

moss and a binding mixture of Jade 403 and Golden acrylics applied to the wire branches.

The end result of this extensive treatment is a model that is structurally secure, visually complete, and faithful to Edwin H. Howells’ original vision. The model will soon be on view over the bar in the Shinnecock Hills clubhouse, where the world’s top golfers will see it when the course hosts the 2018 U.S. Open tournament.

Top, before treatment, overpaint obscures calligraphic details by cartographer Edwin E. Howell; at center, the same section restored by the author. Above, detail of an early photograph used to duplicate the original lettering.

Conservator Chistine Puza inpaints the plaster relief map of ShinnecockHills Golf Club.


Above, Charles Burchfield’s Summer Afternoon, 1948, and at right, detail showing the artist’s signature.

I like to be able to advance and retreat just like a man writing a book. I doubt that very few [writers] ever sit down and leave a paragraph as it first comes into their head. They work over it, delete things and add things.... I like to do that just as they do. —Charles Burchfield

T here was something at once contrary and visionary to the solo exhibit presented by the Museum of Modern Art in 1930, Charles Burchfield: Early Watercolors 1916

to 1918. The exhibition, the first one-artist show the still-new museum ever mounted, contained paintings known to very few. By then, Burchfield was renowned as one of the “American Scene” genre realists that also included Edward Hopper and Grant Wood. But the MoMA show had nothing to do with Burchfield’s popular and saleable style of realism. Instead, it presented landscape paintings that were vivid, surreal, hallucinatory. Burchfield, who had turned to his more conventional style in part to support his family, was much closer in temperament to this earlier, more exuberant work. He

declared 1917, when so many of the exhibit’s best paintings were created, his “Golden Year.”In 1943, as Burchfield turned 50, those youthful paintings called to him again. In middle age, he

abandoned genre painting altogether and returned to his first love, the early watercolors. The master artist, now much more confident of his talent and vision, regarded the Golden Year pictures and determined they were not complete. Adding broad strips of paper around the perimeter of the existing small paintings, he transformed the originals into the nuclei of larger, more fully imagined works. Burchfield called these expanded pictures “reconstructions.” He explained that the smaller pictures, “had a germ of an idea in them … that hadn’t quite come off. By adding to them then I could make them work.”

In 1948, Burchfield augmented one of the 1917 paintings with some two feet of additional paper to produce his masterful Summer Afternoon. By then, he had fully entered a kind of mystical union with nature, evidenced in how the four-foot painting buzzes, shimmers, vibrates and quakes with esoteric fecundity. “An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there,” Burchfield declared. “To do so, he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him.”

The painting, in the collection of the Williams College Museum of Art, arrived at the paper lab at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in generally excellent condition after a conservation treatment in the 1980s to remove it from the artist’s original masonite support. After twenty years it had begun to sag and distort. Treatment to prepare it for an exhibition involved humidifying the paper to relax and expand the distortions before relining with bast-fibered Japanese paper and remounting with a release layer to a paper-faced aluminum honeycomb panel. The thicker and more stable panel returned the painting to plane, but necessitated modifications to the original Burchfield-made frame. WACC’s furniture and frames department modified the frame to accommodate Static Dispersive Acrylic glazing and the new thicker support panel.

Burchfield’s Landscape Mysticism

Feature


WACC News & Notes

William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) was a pioneer among

American painters for depicting African Americans with a

measure of respect, released from the overt dismissal, derision,

and scorn that characterized his era’s imagination. In the decades

before the Civil War, Mount increasingly challenged these

pernicious stereotypes, elevating black men and women to the

center of his pictures, often as the main characters of his affable,

idealized rustic scenes.

Mount was one of America’s first important genre painters,

taking as his subject daily life in rural Long Island, where he

was born and lived much of his life. While his pictures lack the

sophistication of the great genre artists of Europe, from Brueghel

to Chardin, they rose entirely out of American soil, capturing

the young county’s simplicity and naiveté. Modern scholars and

critics also read political and social commentary embedded in the

pictures’ charms. Surveying a retrospective exhibition in 1969, New

York Times critic John Canady observed that “nothing, with Mount,

is quite as simple as it first looks.”

Mount’s depictions of African Americans can appear simplistic

and vaguely offensive to twenty-first century eyes, but in

antebellum America his portrayals pushed the envelope of racial

sympathy. He had grown up close to black men as servants and

slaves in the years before New York outlawed slavery in 1827,

and his earliest scenes, made only a few years after the new law,

fell prey to benign but servile black caricatures. As his thought

matured over the next two decades, Mount’s depictions of race

took on ever-greater pathos. If the artist cannot be said to have

portrayed African Americans as entirely equal to whites, his

pictures did evince a deepening consciousness of shared humanity

and acknowledged the psychological isolation of segregation.

In Eel Spearing at Setauket, Mount created, as scholar Karen

M. Adams has written, “a black figure of unmitigated dignity.” For

This past summer, Leslie Paisley, WACC head paper conservator,

completed a two-year project stabilizing the original wallpaper at the

Bryant Homestead, home of American poet and editor William Cullen

Bryant (1794-1878). The final phase of conservation and reinstallation of

the wallpaper in Bryant’s library took place in July.

The historic house, in Cummington, Massachusetts, was Bryant’s

boyhood home. There he matured as a poet, writing what are considered

America’s first great lyric poems. For fifty years, Bryant was editor

and publisher of the New York Evening Post, a progressive voice for

labor reform, urban greenspace, and abolition. Late in his life, Bryant

repurchased the homestead and significantly expanded it, summering

there for thirteen years. After his death, the house stayed in the family until

it was placed with the Trustees of Reservations, a Massachusetts land

trust.

The textured gilt wallpaper with flocked border is original to Bryant’s

library, where the poet worked on free-verse translations of Homer

during his retirement. The library is the one fully original room in the

house museum, containing furniture, books, art, and other furnishings as

Bryant left them. More than a decade ago, efforts began to preserve the

paper, which had badly deteriorated due to the environment and house

construction. Forty-nine separate pieces of wallpaper were removed,

each piece labeled and documented as to its exact placement.

With assistance from a Save America’s Treasures grant from the

National Park Service, the pieces were brought to WACC to remove

stains, realign tears, and fill and line the paper overall to provide support.

As sections were completed, Paisley and historic wallpaper consultant

Robert Kelly, of Lee, Massachusetts, studied the previous installation,

measured, prepared and lined the walls to accept the paper, and finally

reinstalled the lined wallpaper, replacing each piece in its exact location.

The reinstallation required additional filling and inpainting by Paisley

on-site.

In an interview with the Berkshire Eagle, Paisley said the project

piqued her imagination about Bryant. “He looked up and saw this exact

wallpaper while he was writing,” she said. It is rare to find a nineteenth-

century house with its original wall covering, she noted, making the

restoration particularly significant.William Sidney Mount, Eel Spearing at Setauket,

1845, after treatment.

A rejuvenated masterpiece of antebellum America

Conservator treats wallpaper in home of poet Bryant

its celebration of the landscape, its mood of tense

tranquility, and its interracial and intergenerational

themes, the 1845 oil-on-canvas is, in Adams’s words,

“perhaps Mount’s most enduring contribution to

American art.” The artist noted that the scene was

based on his childhood memories of being taught to

spearfish by an “old Negro by the name of Hector,” a

man who deftly and patiently plied his craft, “with all

the philosophy of a Crane.”

Mount’s crowning achievement is one of the

gems of the collection at the Fenimore Art Museum

in Cooperstown, New York, which received a grant

to have the painting returned to near-original luster.

WACC head paintings conservator Tom Branchick

was well acquainted with the work, having first

studied it in 1979 while enrolled at the then-

Cooperstown Graduate Program in Art Conservation.

“I’ve known the painting forever,” said Branchick.

The treatment required undoing past conservation

that had robbed the picture of numerous small but

distinctive painterly details and subtle effects of

color and light. “Mount’s presence was obscured.

The precision of his draftsmanship had been

compromised by earlier fills and inpainting,”

Branchick explained. “And the varnish was too thick,

all wrong—the picture had gone cloudy.”

Branchick removed layers of grime, varnish, and

awkward inpainting, slowly cleaning the surface back

to Mount’s own pigments and brushstrokes. Before

inpainting losses, some from more than fifty years

ago, he covered the surface with a “barrier layer” of

varnish. This synthetic coating serves not to seal the

picture so much as reveal its full chromatic range, as

a saturating rain intensifies the colors in a garden.

“The barrier layer is the most important layer in a

conservation treatment,” Branchick said. “Otherwise,

you cannot see the true colors put there by the artist.”

The treatment proceeded with inpainting to return

fine detail to, for instance, the small rocks and surface

ripples near the shallows, and restore color matches

in the water and sky. The flat, occluded appearance

the painting had worn for decades was replaced with

a renewed brilliance and sense of depth. “People

can see it now,” said Branchick. “It was extremely

satisfying to bring Mount back.”

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Description: Man’s black, narrow-brimmed top hat with columnar crown, trimmed with black grosgrain ribbon at base

and along brim. Maker’s label inside crown depicts an eagle over a wreath above the inscription, “Siger

& Nichols /88 Maiden Lane/New York.” The hat is made from glossy black pile textile that covers a paper

card support. The appearance of the textile suggests it is silk, with a looped, uncut pile reminiscent of fur.

The textile is seamed diagonally along the rise of the hat and is likely seamed around the top and brim. Hat

structure appears to be entirely supported by card stock to form the stovepipe-shaped crown and brim. A

leather headband with wire edge is sewn into the interior. The interior is lined with “silked paper,” an open

weave silk gauze adhered to a paper backing. Condition: Fair. The card structure supporting the interior crown is compromised with tears and folds. Some

creases are likely a relic of crushing or similar compression. This damage lends the hat a slight crumpled

appearance to its exterior. Treatment: 1. Paper conservator Paisley created a curved support to provide for the hat during repair.

2. The leather inner-band was lifted to gain access to previous mends of the lining and deep creases in the

outer structure.

3. Creases were stabilized with heavyweight Japanese paper adhered with wheat-starch paste and

copolymer adhesive.

4. Paper repairs were pressed with polyester fabric, blotter paper curved to match inside of hat, and small

cloth-covered lead weights. Significant reduction in the creases was achieved but disturbances in the

outer fabric layer will always remain.

5. Paper breaks on the inside of the hat were repaired with remoistenable tissue ‘bandages.’ Previous

patches of Japanese paper were dampened and removed where possible, to access tears and allow

more planar repair, minimizing appearance of the deeper deformations in the hat structure.

6. Areas on the inside of the hat wall lining not easily accessible otherwise were repaired using Japanese

paper toned to minimize its appearance.

7. The repaired paper lining was tucked back under the hatband.

8. The areas along the leather hatband were reattached and stabilized with hollow, spine-type repairs

using toned Japanese paper, also attaching torn and loose elements where accessible. This stabilization

will protect this vulnerable location during future handling.

9. Textile conservator Guidess designed and constructed a clear acrylic mount to protect the hat during

storage, display, and travel.

Note: Future repairs to the paper lining are possible only as long as the leather band is sufficiently supple to

allow manipulation, but as the leather is becoming brittle with age, the window of opportunity for this work is

closing.

Treatment Report is an editorial feature based on conservators’ reports. Wording may not be verbatim.

WACC News & Notes

Treatment ReportObject:Abraham Lincoln’s Stovepipe Hat

Owner: Hildene: The Lincoln Family Home

Conservators:Gretchen Guidess and Leslie Paisley

T homas J. BranchickDirector; Conservator of Paintings/Dept. Head

Mary Catherine BetzAssociate Conservator of Paintings

Nate BruléOffice Assistant; Technician

John ConzettOffice Manager

Kristan GoolsbyAdministrative Assistant; Photographer/Atlanta

Hélène Gillette-WoodardConservator of Objects/Dept. Head

Hugh GloverConservator of Furniture and Wood Objects/Dept. Head

Gretchen GuidessAssistant Conservator for Objects and Textiles

Matthew HamiltonPhotographer

Teresa HaskinsAccounts Manager

Rebecca JohnstonConservator of Paper

Henry KleinConservation Technician

Montserrat Le MenseConservator of Paintings

Leslie PaisleyConservator of Paper/Dept. Head

Mina PorellPre-program Intern; Technician/Atlanta

Christine PuzaAssistant Conservator of Furniture and Wood Objects

Michelle SavantConservator of Objects/Atlanta

Larry ShuttsConservator of Paintings/Atlanta

Sandra L. WebberConservator of Paintings

WACC Staff


Report from Atlanta

By Graham C. Boettcher

The most successful and prolific artist to work in Alabama

prior to the Civil War was the German-born portraitist Nicola

Marschall (1829-1917), who catered to the wealthy families of

Alabama’s “Black Belt,” so named because of the rich black

soil that gave rise to the cotton plantations that were the

state’s mainstay. Marschall is often referred to as the “Artist

of the Confederacy,” because of a long-held belief that he

designed the Confederacy’s first national flag, as well as its first

military uniform, claims that for years have been the subject of

discussion and dispute.

The son of a wealthy tobacco merchant from St. Wendel,

Germany, Marschall immigrated to the United States in 1849,

arriving first in New Orleans, then heading to Mobile to live with

a relative. By August 1851, Marschall had relocated to Marion,

Alabama, where he established a portrait studio. Marion was

known then as the “Athens of the South,” because it was home

to three colleges. These included the Marion Female Institute,

where Marschall joined the faculty as an instructor of art,

language, and music. In 1857, Marschall returned to Europe and

studied painting in Düsseldorf, Munich, Rome, and Paris, before

returning to Marion in 1859.

This portrait depicts Mary Susan Robbins (1856-1918)—

known as Susie—daughter of Selma, Alabama, merchant

John Robbins and his wife Rebecca. One of three portraits

commissioned by the Robbins family (the portrait of Mr. Robbins

was damaged beyond repair and discarded by the family;

while the portrait of Mrs. Robbins is in the collection of the

Birmingham Museum of Art), it was painted immediately after

This page, Nicola Marschall’s Portrait of Mary Susan Robbins, 1859, as it arrived at the Atlanta Art Conservation Center, top, and after treatment. Opposite, detail during treatment showing fills prior to inpainting.

Marschall’s return from Europe,

and is signed “N. Marschall 1859”

on the apron of the chair in the

foreground. The portrait is unusual in

Marschall’s body of work because he

seldom included props or extraneous

elements such as furniture.

During the Civil War, Marschall’s

artistic skills were employed as chief

draftsman of maps and fortifications

for the Second Alabama Regiment

of Engineers. After the war, he

continued to live in Marion, but

increasingly sought work outside

the Black Belt, probably because

the region’s post-war economy was

devastated. This may have ultimately

occasioned the artist’s 1873 move

to Louisville, Kentucky, where he

remained until his death, establishing

a lucrative career as portraitist of that

city’s elites.

As tastes shifted or families

moved away from the Black Belt,

many of Marschall’s portraits

were stored in the less-than-ideal

conditions of basements and attics.

The damage sustained in such

storage from heat, handling, and

mildew might then be exacerbated

by do-it-yourself repairs or heavy-

handed professional restorations.

The Robbins portrait is an exemplar

of such misguided treatment. The

painting was brought to the Atlanta

Art Conservation Center badly torn,

overcleaned (including scrubbing the paint away to the ground in

the background), badly repainted, and coated with polyurethane.

Additionally, it had been glued to 1/4-inch fiberboard (a.k.a.

Masonite) with a water-based adhesive, which had shrunk the

linen canvas, resulting in tenting and paint loss.

Treatment by AACC paintings conservator Larry Shutts

began with cleaning to remove the extensive repainting and

nearly insoluble polyurethane

coating. Polyurethane is for sealing

floors, not paintings; it is made to

be insoluble and walked on. It goes

yellow very quickly and is a terrible

saturator. Luckily in this case, the

painting had been varnished with

a natural resin beforehand, so the

floor sealant did not have very

good adhesion. Larry removed it

mechanically using adhesive tape,

like getting one’s eyebrows waxed.

Since the painting could not be

lifted from the fiberboard backing,

Larry had to work in reverse by

cutting away the board. Using a

table saw with a stacked dado cutter,

he thinned the panel to 1/16-inch

thickness. The remaining board was

shaved off with planes and chisels,

releasing the painted canvas. The

painting could then be lined with a

second layer of canvas, reinforced

with a polyester film interleaf. Once

stabilized, the portrait underwent

extensive inpainting to restore its

appearance. The earlier, destructive

overcleaning had been done inside

the frame, leaving a hidden edge

untouched and in original condition;

this was used as a color guide

for the restoration. To reproduce

the background, Larry used a

splatter technique with highly dilute

retouching paint, flicking the brush

over the canvas while protecting the

main image with a polyester mask.

The conservation treatment was dramatic and labor-intensive,

but successfully returned the historic painting to exhibition quality.

Graham C. Boettcher, Ph.D. is Chief Curator and The William Cary

Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art.

AACC paintings conservator Larry Shutts contributed to this report.

Dramatic measures save portrait by the “Artist of the Confederacy”

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Williamstown Art Conservation Center | 1918 | Art Conservator | Fall 2014

Tech Notes, Fall 2014

Colormen and their MarksA survey of nineteenth-century European paintings in the Clark Art Institute

By Sandra WebberConservator of Paintings

Comprehensive examinations for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s Nineteenth Century European Paintings catalog provided an opportunity for comparative study of the artists’ preparatory materials and techniques and their suppliers. For this survey, three hundred fifty oil paintings were selected, spanning the decades between 1790 and 1910. Two-thirds of the paintings are French, twenty percent are British, and the remaining are by various European artists, some working in France. About forty percent of the paintings date between 1870 and 1890, and many are quite small, due to Mr. Clark’s preference for small pictures. There were two hundred eight canvas supports, one hundred four wood panels, and thirty-eight other cellulosic supports ranging from paper and cardboards to millboard.1

Commercial purveyors had been manufacturing and selling artist materials and tools since at least the 1700s. The nineteenth century saw the invention and manufacture of many new supplies, including the largest expansion of the artist’s palette in a single century. Some shops specialized in preparing the colors, hand- and machine-grinding the dry pigments into a workable paste, hence their trade name, “colormen.” Commercially prepared paints became more prevalent after collapsible tin tubes were introduced in 1841, allowing for longer storage life. Many shops sold an array of materials besides paints, and a few also focused on manufacturing and preparing the painting supports. These suppliers maintained two addresses, the principle one being their salesroom, with a production workshop located in a second building. The larger firms may have provided smaller shops with such items as factory-primed canvas, which required considerable floor space to produce. These businesses were often passed down in families, with numerous name changes as in-laws took over older shops, companies were bought out, or mergers took place. During this period it was not unusual that the role of the colorman also encompass framing and even specialized restoration services, such as lining. All sixteen of the oils-on-paper in the survey had been lined onto stretched canvases, possibly by colormen, allowing them to be framed as paintings without mats and glazing. Some shops were also picture dealers, providing formal or informal exhibition space, which offered a method of extending credit to working artists. Relationships between individual artists or groups of artists sometimes centered around a particular colorman, especially if his wares had a consistent reputation for quality.2

Most of the materials seen in this survey were purchased in major metropolitan shops, primarily London and Paris. By the mid-nineteenth century London’s colormen were fewer and larger in scale, relying more on marketing and distribution, while many small independent art suppliers could still be found in Paris.3 By the early twentieth century, several large firms had emerged in England and France, a few of which are still in the business of making artist colors. The English firm of Winsor and Newton, established in 1832, still maintains

nails that held it, unthreaded the blades from the wire, and set the blades aside to rest and return to whatever shape was most natural for them. Removing the blades gave us visual access to the spacer between the blades and the head, which we discovered was merely the top of a squeeze bottle of glue, covered in black paint and electrical tape. Yet another instance of Oldenburg using whatever was at hand.

The new cross-shaped insert contained a small hole in the middle for the wire to pass through. The insert was covered in black electrical tape to blend in with the rest of the piece. Between the tape and the metal we placed a layer of PeCap, a synthetic woven fabric used as a protective barrier. It’s inert, stiff, and doesn’t respond to moisture. Adhesive was applied to this assembly and it was clamped till dry.

Time had come for reassembly, but as we began to thread the blades back onto the wire, we found that in stabilizing and relaxing them they wanted to position themselves differently from their previous arrangement. If we forced the blades into the same position they had been previously, they would look too upright and not in the spirit of the piece. We consulted a documentary photo that showed the fan at Oldenburg’s 1969 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, which suggested how we might position the blades on the board to make them look more as they were originally. As we moved the blades this way and that, I recalled a discussion Hélène, Leslie and I had had at the beginning of the project.

Our mount maker had come into the lab and asked about the project. We discussed how we might stop the blades from slumping forward and how we didn’t know for certain what the piece looked like when Oldenburg had made it. We also explained that the piece was a sketch, so it didn’t seem to have a great density of intention to begin with—it seemed more like a process piece than something that was fully finished.

When asked about comparative examples, we explained that Oldenburg made another model for a fan sculpture that is pretty straight up and down, but the finished versions of our fan were droopy and hung from the ceiling. Our mount maker said something to the effect of, well, then, what are you saving?

His point resonated with me. In the field of art history, we avoid pinning a work’s meaning to an artist’s intention. Poststructuralist theory declared the “author” dead in the 1960s, and since then we’ve regarded with great skepticism anyone who claims to know what a work is “about” based

on what its artist intended. When faced with the material object, however, we must set aside such theoretical ambiguity to deal with more practical concerns. In contemporary conservation, you have to figure out exactly what it is that needs saving, even if preserving the work means compromising, to some degree, the material object. Concept, for many artists, trumps construction.

We ended up placing the blades somewhere

between entirely upright and entirely drooping. Our position was slightly different from the one in which the blades were originally adhered, but still allowed them to retain their slightly downward cast. The mount is completely invisible from the front of the piece. The new metal inserts that we used to sandwich the blades were supportive enough that we only needed the mount to support a single side.

In an artist’s statement from 1961, Oldenburg wrote, “I am for art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes. I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief. I am for art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie.”

Model for Soft Fan isn’t exactly the same as when it was made in 1965. But I think Oldenburg would be okay with that.

Oldenburg continued from page 8

Before-treatment photograph, documenting extent of the efflorescence.

Figure 1



continued in use by artists well into the nineteenth century, and were especially favored by the Barbizon painters.6 Panels were also particularly desirable for small, detailed cabinet paintings, such as those by Meissonier, as ground applications could be finished to a smoother surface than on canvas. Of the one hundred four wood panels surveyed, sixty-six were visually identified as mahogany, a more dimensionally stable wood than temperate climate species, due to the continuous tropical growing season. Although the majority of mahogany panels (sixty-one percent) were used by artists working in Paris, the earliest mahogany support in the Clark collection is a small John Constable from 1821.7 The mahogany panels also fell most often into the standardized sizes, suggesting mahogany may have been the wood favored by panel-making workshops in the second half of the century. While most of the surveyed panels had some type of ground layer, thirteen mahogany supports had no priming, with the warm wood color often used as part of the composition. Most commercially prepared panels had chamfers cut on all four reverse edges, varying in width from 1/4- to 3/4-inch, and the backs were factory coated with varnish or a red-brown or gray paint or stain.

Among the painters who employed wooden supports, Boldini, Forain, Goupil, de Jonge, Seignac, and Stevens seemed to have preferred mahogany. All four Millet paintings were done on oak panels, one stamped G & C, and another marked Luniot Ganne, the name of a fabricator and supplier in the Barbizon area. Three dePenne paintings all bear the same Paul Denis colorman’s mark, although they include one mahogany and one oak panel, and a canvas. It is also fair to assume that several wood panels have had their stamps removed during major restorations. About twenty percent of the panels had been thinned and either backed with a secondary panel and/or cradled as part of a restoration. A few cradles were installed as part of the original commercial production as a built-in protection against warping.8

The backs of the supports might also be marked with a black numeral designating a

a worldwide reputation for quality goods, as does the merged French company Lefranc and Bourgeois, which originated as a small shop in 1773.4

These companies sometimes marked the backs of their prepared supports, usually with a black stamp or stencil, displaying their name and address, and occasionally their available wares and services (Fig. 1). Most stamps were about 3-by-5 inches in size and often oval in shape, with the address and wares in smaller type surrounding the colorman’s name. A few later stamps, such as Hardy-Alan’s, appeared in the shape of an artist’s palette and English colormen sometimes used printed-paper labels. Rarely the marks took other forms such as the small brand used by the Italian panel maker Giosi.

A total of fifty-three supplier’s marks were recorded in the survey; twenty-four on canvases, twenty-five on wood panels, and four on the remaining supports. The central placement of most canvas stamps suggests that they were applied after the primed fabric had been stretched, probably by the shop selling the end product. However, some stamps may also reflect the actual preparer, a colorman with enough workshop space to size and ground rolls of fabric.5 Canvas had begun its use as an acceptable oil painting support during the fifteenth century and had overtaken wood as the favorite support by the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Artists from the early decades of the nineteenth century were using coarser, more open weave fabrics that they were often priming themselves. After 1840 the linens became finer and tighter in weave with the introduction of power looms, and most artists bought their canvases already primed and stretched, just as they do today. Various ground colors, opacities, and surface textures were available on the commercially prepared supports, with the majority being oil-based. About half of the surveyed canvases had the most commonly seen off-white ground color. Among the artists using other ground colors, John Constable was notable for his consistent use of various shades of pink. Considering that seventy percent of the two hundred eight canvases are lined, there are probably a considerable number of additional stamps hidden from view.

Wood panels prepared by specialized workshops

n a m e of su ppl i e r C l a r k pa i n t i ng

—APRIN 43 Rue de (--val) Paris, (pein)dres & Toiles (oval stamp on stretcher) [colors and canvas]

Jean Beraud, Seaside Café, 1884, canvas with an unusual original stretcher design. accompanied by a second partial stamp “chass----erges”, probably the stretcher maker

B or R (on a white paper label) The letter, buried under the white paint daub, likely indicates one initial of the supplier.

Camille Pissarro, The Artist’s Palette with a Landscape, 1878-80, rectangular mahogany palette with thumb hole.

?--& PERE Rue---- 8, Paris tableaux (large stamp) [possibly a dealer]

Jean-Louis Forain, Walk in the Sun, 1880-83, mahogany panel.

ALEXANDRE 146 Avenue de Neuilly bis (Seine) Paris brosserie et plumeaux coulours fines et vernis toiles a peindre encaderments (stamp) [colors, varnishes, canvas, brushes, frames]

FranCisCo Domingo y Margués, Drinking Song, 1890, mahogany panel.

BELOT No 3 Rue de L’Arbre Sec Paris (Oval stamp) [manufacturer and seller of varnish and colors at this address until 1834]

Pierre Joseph, Redouté Flowers, 1820, canvas.

P. CONTET 34 Rue Lafayette Paris (Stamp) [colorman, framer, dealer, at this address 1887-? [Contet took over Latouche’s shop]

Camille Pissarro, Port of Rouen: Unloading Wood, 1898, canvas. Also a large “33” stamp.Camille Pissarro, Le Pont Neuf, 1902, canvas.

(1se?) CORNU 13 Rue Laffitte Paris Tableaux dessin (stamp) [colorman, art dealer or restorer?]

Constant Troyon, Going to Market on a Misty Morning, 1851, mahogany panel. stamped across cradle bars

DEFORGE 8 Boulevard Montmartre, Ateliér Rue Clichy No 7 Paris (Stamp) [Bertrand Deforge, Manufacturer & seller of varnish & colors, seller of curiosities, at this address 1841-1857.]

NarCisse Virgile Diaz de la Pena, Two Great Oaks, 1854, canvas.

DEFORGE-CARPENTIERS 8 Boulevard Montmartre, Atelier Rue Clichy 7 Paris (stamp) [Marie-Charles-Edouard. Manufacturers and sellers of colors, painting dealers, framer, under this stamp at this address from 1858-1869]

Camille Pissarro, Road de Versailles, Louveciennes, 1870, canvas. Carolus-Duran, Spanish Woman, 1876, mahogany panel.

DEFORGE-CARPENTIERS 8 Montmartre, Atelier 62 Rue Legendre (Batignolles from 1868) Paris (large oval stamp) [maker and seller of colors, canvas under this name at this address 1866-69]

Paul SeignaC, The Sick Child, 1870-76, mahogany panel. Eduardo ZamaCois y Zabala, Platonic Love, 1870, mahogany panel. Also stamp for Beugniet 10 Rue Laffitte Paris (frame maker, dealer, restorer. Print publisher) at this address 1851-1891)

DEFORGE-CARPENTIERS, 6 Rue Halevy, Atelier (62) rue Legendre (Batignolles) Paris Couleurs fines et toiles peindre (Large oval stamp) [Colors, wood-gilding, framer, painting dealer, restorer, at this location from 1871-1879]

Alphonse de Neuville, Champigny 2 Dec. 1870, 1875-77, mahogany panel.

PAUL DENIS succr Maison Merlin 10 Rue de Médicis Paris Fabrique de coloueurs, toiles, articles de dessin. (stamps and brands) [manufacturer and seller of colors, canvas, drawing materials]

Olivier de Penne, Hunting Hounds, 1850-97, mahogany panel. (large oval stamp) Olivier de Penne, Two Pointers, 1850-97, canvas. (large oval stamp) Olivier de Penne, End of the Hunt, 1850-97, oak panel. (small brand impressed into end grain)

DUBUS 60 Blvd Malesherbes Paris Couleurs Fine toiles & Peindre..tableaux & Restauration (stamp) [Seller of colors, canvas, dealer?, and restoration services]

Gustave Caillebotte, Seine at Argentueil, 1892, canvas.

E.DUPRÉ ---- Paris (Stamp) Daniel Hernandez, The Model, 1900, canvas. (Accompanied by a smaller stamp “Modele Depose B” on stretcher from Bourgeois Aine, 1870s-1890s.

DURAND (Paris?) Brosses, Pinceau, Etoiles et Coulours (Oval stamp) [Seller of brushes, pencils (small brushes), canvas, colors]

Daniel Hernandez, Woman in the Bois de Boulogne, 1885, canvas. (Accompanied by smaller stamp “Modele Depose B” on stretcher)

F (stamp) [colorman? possibly Foinet? see below] Daniel Hernandez, Pierrette, 1878, mahogany panel.

FG 415 (stamp) [Unknown if colorman] Eugene Isabey, Landing Stage on the Jetty, 1860, mahogany panel.

PAUL FOINET (van Eyck) 54 Rue N.D. des Champs Paris toiles & couleurs fines (stamp) [seller of colors, canvas]

Carolus-Duran, The Artist’s Gardener, 1893, canvas.

A. Garcia (impressed mark) [Spanish photographer] Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, Beach at Valencia, 1904, portion of a standard grey cardboard photo mount.

GIOSI, Roma (Branded into wood)(panel maker or colorman)

Jose GarCia y Ramos, Inside the Bullring, Seville, c. 1880, hardwood panel

G & C (oval stamp with numerals) (panel maker, colorman, or dealer?) Jean-FranCois Millet, Young Girl Guarding Her Sheep, 1862, oak panel. Accompanied by numerals “9506”LuCius Rossi, Woman Reading, 1875, mahogany panel. Accompanied by numerals “10014”

n a m e of su ppl i e r C l a r k pa i n t i ng

HARDY-ALAN 56 Rue de Cherche Midi Paris (Dorure encadrements), (sometimes a very large palette shaped stamp) [Framer, gilder, colorman, canvas preparer?, at this address by the dated paintings, from at least 1889-1904] [There was an E. Hardy & G.Milori colorshop first at 261-263 rue du Paradis from 1861-1889, then at 16 tur Bourg-Tibourg until at least 1899]

Pierre Bonnard, Women With Dog, 1891, canvas. (partial stamp on stretcher)ViCtoria Dubourg, Roses, 1875-1900, canvas. (large canvas stamp accompanied by “6” (portrait size), stretcher also marked “dorure encadrements”.) Also dealer stamp: F. & J. Tempelaere 70 Blvd Malesherbes Paris. Henri Fantin-Latour, BoWl of Roses on a maRBle taBle, 1885, canvas. (large palette-shaped stamp applied before stretching: may indicate the canvas preparer) Also dealer stamp: F. & J. Tempelaere 70 Blvd Malesherbes, Paris.Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jacques fRay, 1904, canvas. (stamp on stretcher) Pierre-Auguste Renoir, self PoRtRait, 1899, canvas. (canvas stamp)

LATOUCHE 34 Rue de Lafayette (Paris) toiles-encadrements (Stamp) [colors, frames, art dealer at this address 1870-1886.]

Ferdinand Heilbuth, A Lady with Flowers, 1875-80, mahogany panel.

LUNIOT GANNE panneaux de chene Pre Oté a Barbizon) (oval surround on stamp) [Victoire Ganne & Joseph-Bernard Luniot, (oak) panel makers?, also owners of a hostel in Barbizon area

Charles Emile JaCque, Interior, 1852, oak panel. Also dealer stamp: F. & J. Tempelaere 70 Blvd Malesherbes Paris.Jean Francois Millet, The Knitting Lesson, 1860, oak panel.

MOIRINAT 484? Faubourg St Honore Paris (Stamp) Jules Breton, Jeanne Calvet, 1865, millboard.

2 MULLER, Paris (red stencil) [colorman or dealer] Jules Breton, Jeanne Calvet, 1865, millboard.

NEWMAN, Soho Square London (round stamp with Newman crest) [James Newman & Co., 17 Gerrard St Soho London, manufacturer of colors, pencils and brushes, seller of supports, from 1785-1936, when merged with Reeves]

John Constable, Sketch of the Opening of Waterloo Bridge, 1829, canvas fragment.

Ange OTTOZ 2 Rue de la Michodière Paris (Stamp) [manufacturer and seller of colors and varnishes at this address 1827-1856, and with workshop at 11 rue Helder from 1857-1869]

Johan Barthold, Jongkind Frigates, 1855-60, canvas. Also stamp for dealer Gustave Tempelaere 23 Rue Laffitte Paris.

Alexis OTTOZ 46 Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Paris Coulours

Fines Etoiles --- - & tableaux (arch-shaped stamp) [colors, canvas, paintings dealer, restorer, at this address 1867-1874]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Tama, the Japanese Dog, c. 1876, canvas. Also stamped “8”, (portrait size).

Jerome OTTOZ 22 Rue Labruyère, Paris Md de Couleurs Fines (Stamp) [color maker and seller, at this address 1862-1870]

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, Portrait of a Man, c.1875-80, canvas.

REY et CIE 51 Rue de Larochefoucauld, 64 Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Paris (stamp) [seller of colors and possibly canvas, at this address 1877-1880]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Woman with a Fan, 1879, canvas. (primed reverse of canvas suggests colorman preparation)

REY-PERROD 51 Rue de Larochefoucauld, 64 Rue Notre-Dame Paris-de-Lorette, (stamp) seller of colors, painting restorer. At this address c. 1882-c. 1885.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Marie-Therese Durand-Ruel Sewing, 1882, canvas.

CHARLES ROBERSON AND CO. 99 Longacre Road London,

manufacturer of water and oil colors materials for drawing &

painting [In business from 1819 to 1975]

William Fettes Douglas, Women in Church, 1860s, composition board. (Stamp)Emile Friant, Madame Seymour, 1889, mahogany panel. (stamped paper label)

ROWNEY MANUFACTURERS, London (stamp) [in business since 1783, merged with Daler in 1983]

FrederiCk Goodall, Mother and Children (The Picnic), 1851, mahogany panel.

ROWNEY AND CO. (impressed brand) Adolphe-Charles-Eduardo Steinhall, The Bibliophile, 1890, mahogany panel.

P. THOMINET Cousin Freres Succr 100 Avenue Victor Hugo Paris Toiles à peindre et colours fines (stamp) [Colors, canvas]

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot, The Coming Storm, 1905, canvas. Accompanied by a stamp from the framer L. Prevotés, 167 Rue de Pompe, Paris.

VIEILLE 26 rue Breda Paris Md de Couleurs Re-entoile et

Restaure les Tableaux (stamp) [H. Vieille. manufacturer and seller of colors, relining and restoration, at this address 1865-1872]

Alfred Stevens, Woman in White, 1872, laminate cardboard . (stamp reads 30 rue Breda)

VIEILLE 35 rue Laval Paris Md de Couleurs entoile et restaure les

tableax (oval stamp)[H. Vieille, son-in-law and successor to Ferrod, maker and seller of colors, canvas, restoration at this address 1873-1878]

Alphonse de Neuville, Grenadier, 1875-76, mahogany panel. Also stamp of Beugniet 10 Rue Lafitte Paris, (frame maker, restorer, dealer, print publisher)Alfred Stevens, Mother and Child, 1875-80, mahogany panel.Alfred Stevens, Fall (one of 4 seasons), 1877, canvas. (seen during relining)

H. VIEILLE & E. TROISGROS rue de Lavel 35 (Paris) colours. toiles,

panneaux (palette shaped stamp) [Sold colors, panels & canvas, under these names at this address from 1879-1883]

Giovanni Boldini, Madame Celine Leclanche, 1881, canvas.

Williamstown Art Conservation Center | 2322 | Art Conservator | Fall 2014

Members of the Consortium

Williamstown

Art Conservation Center

227 South Street, Williamstown,

MA 01267

Addison Gallery of American Art,

Phillips Academy

—Andover, MA

Albany Institute of History & Art

—Albany, NY

Alice T. Miner Colonial Collection

—Chazy, NY

T he Arkell Museum

—Canajoharie, NY

Arnot Art Museum

—Elmira, NY

Art Complex Museum

—Duxbury, MA

Bennington Museum

—Bennington, VT

Berkshire Museum

—Pittsfield, MA

Bowdoin College Museum of Art

—Brunswick, ME

Charles P. Russell Gallery,

Deerfield Academy

—Deerfield, MA

T he Cheney Homestead of the

Manchester Historical Society

—Manchester, CT

Colby College Museum of Art

—Waterville, ME

Connecticut Historical Society

—Hartford, CT

T he Daura Gallery at Lynchburg

College

—Lynchburg, VA

Eric Carle Museum of Picture

Book Art

—Amherst, MA

Farnesworth Art Museum

—Rockland, ME

Fenimore Art Museum

—Cooperstown, NY

Fort Ticonderoga

—Ticonderoga, NY

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center,

Vassar College

—Poughkeepsie, NY

Frederic Remington Art Museum

—Ogdensburg, NY

Gershon Benjamin Foundation,

—Clayton, GA

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center,

—Hartford, CT

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,

Cornell University

—Ithaca, NY

Historic Deerfield, Inc.

—Deerfield, MA

Hood Museum of Art,

Dartmouth College

—Hanover, NH

T he Hyde Collection

—Glens Falls, NY

T he Lawrenceville School

—Lawrenceville, NJ

Mead Art Museum,

Amherst College

—Amherst, MA

Memorial Art Gallery,

University of Rochester

—Rochester, NY

Middlebury College Museum of Art

—Middlebury, VT

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum

—South Hadley, MA

Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts

Institute

—Utica, NY

Museum of Connecticut History

—Hartford, CT

Neuberger Museum,

Purchase College, State University

of New York

—Purchase, NY

New Hampshire Historical Society

—Concord, NH

New York State Office of General

Services, Empire State Plaza Art

Collection

—Albany, NY

Norman Rockwell Museum at

Stockbridge

—Stockbridge, MA

Picker Art Gallery,

Colgate University

—Hamilton, NY

Portland Museum of Art

—Portland, ME

Preservation Society of Newport

County

—Newport, RI

Rhode Island School of Design

Museum of Art

—Providence, RI

T he Rockwell Museum of

Western Art

—Corning, NY

Roland Gibson Gallery, State

University of New York

—Potsdam, NY

Smith College Museum of Art,

—Northampton, MA

Springfield Library and Museums

Association

—Springfield, MA

Sterling and Francine Clark Art

Institute

—Williamstown, MA

Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L.K.

Morris Foundation

—Lenox, MA

Union College

—Schenectady, NY

Vermont Historical Society

—Montpelier, VT

Vermont Museum and Gallery

Alliance

—Shelburne, VT

Williams College Museum of Art

—Williamstown, MA

Atlanta Art Conservation Center

6000 Peachtree Road

Atlanta, GA 30341

Alabama Historical Commission

—Montgomery, AL

Booth Western Art Museum

—Cartersville, GA

Brenau University

—Gainesville, GA

Columbia Museum of Art

—Columbia, SC

T he Columbus Museum

—Columbus, GA

High Museum of Art

—Atlanta, GA

Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art

—Demorest, GA

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

—Montgomery, AL

Morris Museum of Art

—Augusta, GA

Telfair Museum of Art

—Savannah, GA

Mission Statement

T he mission of the Williamstown

Art Conservation Center, a

nonprofit institution, is to protect,

conserve and maintain the objects

of our cultural heritage; to provide

examination, treatment, consultation

and related conservation services

for member institutions, and for

other nonprofit organizations,

corporations and individuals; to

conduct educational programs with

respect to the care and conserva-

tion of works of art and objects of

cultural interest; to participate in the

training of conservators; to promote

the importance of conservation

and increase the awareness of

the issues pertinent to collections

care; and to conduct research and

disseminate knowledge to advance

the profession.

standard size. Thirteen of the paintings in this survey had such numbers, although not all accompanied a colorman’s shop stamp. French and English supports had been sold for many years in a number of standardized proportions and sizes. For example, the popular English portrait dimensions were known by names, such as the 30-by-25-inch bust length, the 36-by-28-inch “Kit-Kat” (a portrait including the hands but less than half-length), and the 50-by-40-inch half-length. The French sold their supports in three categories with a common height measurement and different widths designated for three painting genres, portrait, landscape, and marine. The distribution of surveyed pictures on standard French sizes suggests the portrait widths were the most popular, regardless of subject. The French centimeter measurements were often close to an English equivalent, for example the French portrait size #25 was similar to the English 30-by-25-inch bust length, suggesting the standards may have been universal.9 Many of these proportions are still commercially prepared and employed by artists today.

Many colormen’s addresses and marks are datable due to business directories and historical reference publications. This can be of use in placing an undated painting into the right period of an artist’s body of work. The accompanying appendix cites the artists and paintings found with each listed supplier’s mark. In the listing, the bold type indicates the actual text of the colorman mark recorded during the survey. With so many French paintings in the collection, it is not surprising that most of the stamps cite Parisian establishments.

1. Data collected and analyzed by the author. Robert Sterling Clark Day Diaries 1919-1945, 3 transcribed volumes, Clark Art Institute Curatorial Dept.

2. Stéphanie Constantin, “The Barbizon Painters: A Guide to their Suppliers”, Studies in Conservation, Vol 46, (IIC, London (2001), 49-56. Iris Shaefer, Caroline von Saint-George and Katja Lewerentz, Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists, (Skira, Milan, 2008), p. 47-48, 65-66.

3. On a London map dated 1791, about ten colorman shop locations were cited, some not surviving far into the nineteenth century. Those that did survive consolidated and merged to form a handful of firms, some of which are still in business. By contrast, a Paris directory for 1850 listed two hundred seventy-six paint dealers, and later in the century there were still many small colorman shops in business. Don Pavey, with Peter J. Staples, The Colormen’s Story, (Rickett and Colman Leisure Ltd, Whealdstone, 1984), p. 27. Schaefer, et al, 1 Painting Light, p 43. Constantin, “Barbizon Painters Suppliers”, p. 49-56.

4. Constantin, The Barbizon Painters: Suppliers. Pavey, The Colormen’s Story, p.18.

5. Alexander W. Katlan, American Artists’ Materials Vol II: A Guide to Stretchers, Panels, Millboards, and Stencil Marks, (Sound View Press, Madison CT, 1992), p. 296. Schaefer, et al, Painting Light, p 45.

6. Schaefer, et al, Painting Light, .p 53.

7. The wood identifications were made by the author, with the assistance of Hugh Glover of Williamstown Art Conservation Center’s Furniture Department, and Alexander Carlisle, formerly of the same department.

8. Mahogany panels in the late nineteenth century could be purchased unprimed, primed, or cradled from Bourgeios Ainé., for example. Schaefer, et al, Painting Light, p. 53-55.

9. Winsor and Newton 1853 advertisement, in Henry Mogford, Instructions for Cleaning, Repairing, Lining and Restoring Oil Paintings, (Schultze and Co for Winsor and Newton, London, 1853), appendix pp 2-3. Kurt Wehlte, The Materials and Techniques of Painting, translated by Ursus Dix, (van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1982), p. 344-45.

Addresses and colormen information: S. Constantin “The Barbizon Painters: A Guide to Their Suppliers”, Studies in Conservation, 46 (2001) 49-67. Sally A. Woodcock, “The Roberson Archive: Content and Significance,” Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice, University of Leiden, Netherlands, 1995, publisher: Getty Conservation Institute. Peter J. Staples, The Artist’s Colorman’s Story, Rechitt Colman Leisure Ltd, London, 1984.

Part one of a two-part series. Next: Underdrawings.

Sandra Webber has been a paintings conservator with the

Williamstown Art Conservation Center for more than thirty-four

years. From 2001 to 2012, she worked with a team of art historians

on the two-volume Catalog of Nineteenth Century European Paintings

in the Clark Art Institute (Yale, 2013). Every painting was thoroughly

examined from the support to the varnish, using ultraviolet light,

infrared reflectography, microscopy, and, where necessary,

X-radiography. Her technical reports, which accompany each of the

three hundred sixty-six oil painting catalog entries, were the basis for

the data compiled and analyzed in this article.


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