Looking Back: Three Conservation Profiles

For our March Project Profile, the Institute is taking a look back at three recipients of our Conservation Project Support grants. As the details of IMLS’ Connecting to Collections initiative unfold, we want to shine a spotlight on some of the important conservation work that the Institute has funded in the past. Enjoy the following three profiles:

Gilbert Stuart Masterpieces Conserved with IMLS Grant
Bowdoin College Museum of Art - Originally posted January 2003

The Art of the Book: Preserving Islamic Manuscripts at the Walters Walters Art Museum - Originally posted November 2001

Keeping Bugs in Their Place with Help from IMLS
Science Museum of Minnesota - Originally posted June 2000

Bowdoin College Museum of Art - Originally posted January 2003

Grant: 2000 Conservation Project Support Grant, $6,662.

Contact: Katy Kline, Director
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
9400 College Station
Brunswick, Maine 04011-8494
Telephone: 207-725-3275
Fax: 207-725-3762
E-mail:artmuseum@bowdoin.edu

Web site: http://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum

For nearly 200 years, visitors to the Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (25 miles from Portland) have been able to enjoy the stunning portraits of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Executed circa 1805 by American portraitist Gilbert Stuart and bequeathed to the college in 1811 by its founder, James Bowdoin III, the paintings form the centerpiece of the college museum's collection of colonial and federal portraiture. The Jefferson painting has gained enormous national exposure through widespread reproduction in history books, on posters, and even on a postage stamp.

Now, as the museum plans for a major renovation that will update and expand exhibit spaces and create a more stable environment with a full climate control system, the portraits are receiving a thorough conservation treatment. With financial assistance from an IMLS Conservation Project Support (CPS) grant, the museum is able to address important conservation concerns with the help of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Massachusetts. Once the paintings have received treatment, they will be stable enough to occasionally travel to major exhibitions in distant cities and will be in a condition to better tell the stories of the gifted American painter who created them and of the historic figures he depicted.

Paintings with a Purpose

According to Bowdoin College Museum of Art Director Katy Kline, the paintings were commissioned to fulfill an important role for the young government of the United States. James Bowdoin III was President Thomas Jefferson's minister plenipotentiary to Spain and France. He commissioned the portraits with the intent of taking them with him to Europe to introduce these leaders of the new nation to the diplomats he would be receiving. As it turned out, however, Bowdoin returned to the United States before the paintings were completed.

Bowdoin had turned to the new nation's preeminent portraitist, Gilbert Stuart, for this important project. Stuart was born of humble beginnings in 1755 in North Kingston, Rhode Island. The son of an immigrant Scot who operated a snuff mill, the young Stuart showed an early aptitude for painting and received his first formal training from Scottish artist Cosmo Alexander, whom he accompanied to Edinburgh in 1771. He returned home after the death of the older painter, only to travel again to Europe on the eve of the American Revolution in 1775. In London, he worked as an assistant to Benjamin West and quickly developed his signature style and made many useful social contacts. In 1793, Stuart returned to America and established a successful career.

Stuart's style reflected both his training in Europe and the sensibilities of Federal America. The Bowdoin College Museum of Art describes it thus:

Stuart's mature style had its origins in the dramatic brushwork of eighteenth-century British exemplars such as Sir Joshua Reynolds. However, upon his return to America his portraits become more sober and place greater emphasis on the sitter's personality; yet they continue to express the dash and color of their British counterparts. The successful syntheses of republican frankness and European elegance led American critics to hail Stuart as the preeminent portraitist of his day, a title which he arguably still holds.

Modern Treatment for Historic Paintings

Kline finds that directing the conservation of such "venerable and important treasures" as the Stuart Jefferson and Madison paintings is both "exciting and a bit scary." These paintings are so significant they are on a list of paintings that cannot leave the college without approval from the Trustees.

She enlisted the help of Thomas Branchick, Director and Painting Conservator of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, a nonprofit founded in 1977 by a consortium of museums and historical societies (including the Bowdoin College Museum of Art) in the Northeast to treat paintings, photographs, objects, furniture, and works of art on paper.

Surprisingly, the main priority for treatment of the nearly 200-year-old oil paintings was to undo a conservation treatment the paintings received in 1967. The cause for concern was what conservators call a "dramatically enhanced weave impression." This means that the canvas threads, which vary in their individual widths, became too clearly visible from the presentation side of the paintings.

Records show that a conservator in 1967 lined the paintings because they were at risk of flaking. The lining he used was linen with an aluminum interleaf affixed to the back of the painting canvas with wax resin as the adhesive. According to Branchick, the flat surface of the aluminum pushed out the threads from the back side of the canvas, flattening the topography of the back of the canvas and creating the enhanced weave impression on the front. While Branchick has occasionally during his 25 years of conservation work seen and corrected this condition, he said he had never seen such an extreme case of enhanced weave impression before.

Branchick is in the process of removing old adhesives from the paintings and relining them with linen and a thermo-plastic with the tradename BEVA 371. The paintings have been cleaned; the surface dirt and grime have been removed; the varnish has been removed; and once they are both relined, they will each receive a saturating coat of natural resin varnish and a final coat of synthetic varnish.

Kinder and Gentler Conservation

"The changes to the conservation discipline over the past 40 years have been dramatic," said Kline, who has been a curator and museum director for most of that time. Indeed, Branchick said, "Half of what we do at the conservation center is undoing what was done with the best of intentions in the past." He said, "The conservation profession has become kinder and gentler. Affixing a total lining to the back is not something we would do today."

According to Branchick, new conservation approaches are greatly assisted by today's technology and a greater choice of materials. "There are so many other adhesives that a conservator can use, and so many different options, as far as a method of attachment (for linings): the degree of pressure, the amount of temperature, the choice of fabric," he said. He described silicon rubber matting that cushions the paintings on work surfaces and new sensors that can be used to ensure that the painting is not heated irregularly. "Technology is really aiding us so we can be exact about what we are doing," he said. "Precision is about having the ability to control that precision."

An even more important advancement in conservation according to Branchick, is the greater documentation conservators make when planning and executing treatments. The records from the 1967 treatment plan described the linen and wax, for instance, but omitted any mention of an aluminum interleaf. This led Branchick to speculate whether the museum was even consulted about that aspect of the treatment. He said, "a conservator now, adhering to the American Institution for Conservation code of ethics, will get a lot more detailed about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and the materials used." Clients are consulted, and conservation reports include photographs.

For Branchick, the conservation process involves fitting together the pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle of the physical history of an object. As the Stuart paintings have been examined, they have raised new questions about their history and answered unasked questions as well. The work that Branchick and the staff of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art are doing today will ensure that information is readily available to the caretakers of the paintings for the next 200 years.

Walters Art Museum - Originally posted November 2001

Grant: 1997 Conservation Project Support Grant, $50,000

Website: http://thewalters.org

Contact: Abigail Quandt
Head of Book and Paper Conservation
aquandt@thewalters.org

Priscilla Anderson
Collections Conservator
Baker Library 123-I
Harvard Business School
panderson@hbs.edu

Marianna Shreve Simpson
Independent Scholar
simpson@jhu.edu

With the reopening of its Centre Street building last month, the Walters Art Museum of Baltimore unveiled a reinstallation of the building's permanent exhibits that provides beautiful new contexts for already stunning pieces of art. With four levels of new galleries, the building showcases the museum's extraordinary ancient, medieval, early Renaissance, and Islamic art collections.
Among the many improvements to the Walters' permanent exhibits, is the first ever display of a selection of rare Islamic manuscripts in cases with objects of similar origin, giving visitors more context for understanding their artistic and cultural value.

Before an IMLS Conservation Project Support grant was awarded to stabilize the condition of the manuscripts, the museum could not consider such a display. The sensitivity of manuscripts to light requires limiting the light levels and the duration of a manuscript exhibit. With a large--now stable--Islamic manuscript collection to draw upon, Walters curators were able to develop a plan to rotate the manuscripts in order to limit their time on exhibit to three months.

A Premier Collection

The Walters' highly regarded 840-piece manuscript collection includes 236 Near Eastern volumes, calligraphies, paintings, and bindings. "The collection is notable because of its size and the variety of titles," said Marianna Shreve Simpson, former Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Islamic Art at the Walters. "It is the largest collection of bound Islamic manuscripts in any art museum in the United States," she said. In addition to more than two dozen volumes of the Koran, the holy book of Islam, the Walters collection contains numerous literary, scientific, and historical texts, many with fine illumination and illustrations. The collection covers the full expanse of Muslim history, from its formative phase (8th to 10th centuries) through modern times (18th to 19th centuries). It also represents the main cultures of the Islamic world: Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Indian.

While the holdings are not unique, they reflect the interest of the museum's founder, Henry Walters, said Simpson, who currently serves as Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art. "The Islamic collection fits with Henry Walter's overall interest in beautiful books," she said, "books as works of art." According to Simpson, it includes such notables as a beautiful manuscript from a famous 14th century multi-volume set of the Koran made in Egypt for an amir (commander) of the Mamluk dynasty and several volumes made for Akbar and other Mogul emperors of India from the 16th and 17th centuries illustrated by the leading Mogul court artists.

Eastern Challenges

The starting point for the conservation effort, said Priscilla Anderson, the rare book conservator hired to supervise the project, was an earlier survey of the entire Islamic collection conducted under a different grant. "The collection showed a lot of variety in terms of condition," she said. While some manuscripts required minor work, such as repairs to papertears and rehousing. Others required complete disbinding and reassembly or the microscope-aided work of paint consolidation. The grant would eventually cover work on roughly 100 manuscripts.

The Islamic manuscripts presented the conservators with a number of challenges because they are constructed with materials and techniques that differ significantly from their Western counterparts. The first difference, said Anderson, is the type of paper, which is often burnished, or rubbed smooth with a hard stone.
The burnished surface is shinier than the matte surfaces of the handmade papers used for mending, so the conservators had to find an effective method of blending in their repair materials.

The inks and pigments used in making the Near East manuscripts originated from different sources than their Western counterparts. Iron gall ink, commonly used in the West, was also used in very early Islamic manuscripts. Later manuscripts have a carbon-based ink, an ink that yields a darker text, but is also water-soluble and can smudge. Great care must be taken to reduce the moisture that comes into contact with these carbon-based inks. Traditional preparation of the paper can in some manuscripts make the inks and pigments
prone to flake off of the page. The treatment the conservators used to address flaking paint and ink is a paint consolidation with a gelatin applied in ultrasonic mist. For this highly uncommon and specialized treatment, conservators rely on surgical microscopes to identify areas of potential paint loss.

Tough Decisions

Abigail Quandt, the Walters' senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books, was ultimately responsible for deciding how much treatment each piece received given the grant's funding limits and time constraints. One item, known by its accession number W.659, had been in such poor shape, that prior to treatment conservators had not even allowed its box to be opened. The manuscript illustrated one of the most dramatic restorations and typified some of the difficult decisions the conservators faced when deciding treatments. Number W.659 is a secular text on natural history. Though not a priority piece for study orexhibition, it was in dire need of treatment. Many of its pages were falling out of the bound volume, parts of pages were missing, and the cover was no longer usable. The manuscript was in need of complete disbinding and reassembly. The job needed the full time attention of two conservators for nearly three months. Of special concern was the copper-based pigment used on each page in a border around the text. Often found in Islamic texts, the pigment becomes more acidic over time and eats right through the paper. In this case it had caused the separation of a significant number of text panels from the pages.

Associate paper conservator Elissa O'Loughlin was involved with the selection and preparation of new paper for end leaves and mending. She described the decision of how to treat the
corrosive copper-based ink as one that would have long term ramifications and one for which manuscript conservators around the world have no ready answers. She solicited advice from conservators treating similar problems in Germany to determine a course of action based on scientific studies. After careful consideration of all options and potential outcomes, the conservators devised their plan for treatment.

Collaborative Expertise

Expertise needed to determine conservation treatment was often sought from non-conservation experts said Priscilla Anderson. In one case, she consulted with a world-renown calligrapher, Mohamed Zakariya, an American who converted to Islam and who has been practicing calligraphy (a highly revered skill since copying the Koran is an act of piety) for more than 20 years. The conservators also consulted with a Turkish paper marbler, Jake Benson, again in an effort to understand how the manuscripts were originally made.

"These materials are composite objects. They are made of leather, paper, varnish, paint, ink, and cloth," said Anderson. "What was wonderful about the Walters is that I could draw on the expertise of paintings conservators and objects conservators." She said, "For instance, I had never worked with lacquered furniture, but the objects conservators helped me deal with repairs to cracks in layers of varnish on the binding, which has much in common with furniture varnish."

Art of the Book

Anderson recognizes the special nature of the objects she conserves. "One of the really special things about working on a book is that because it is meant to be held, it has to move. It has to move for it to be used in the way it was intended. It was engineered to withstand the moving of the spine and the bending of the pages. This is different than a painting that hangs on a wall or a sculpture that sits in a garden, and it has implications for a conservator. The conserved book has to be sturdy enough for it to be handled."

Simpson agrees: "The last thing one wants when turning the pages of a manuscript is to watch in horror as pieces of paint flake off." She added, "The conservators corrected the weaknesses and deficiencies and made it possible for me and my colleagues to open manuscripts safely and turn the pages safely without worrying about further damage. Now the public has the chance to really share these wonderful works and the culture that they represent. Making manuscripts and culturally significant holdings available to a wider public audience is really the goal of any museum."

Science Museum of Minnesota - Originally posted June 2000

Grant: 1999 Conservation Project support grant, $59,933 - including $9,933 for education component; Matching Funds: $91,286

Contact: Gretchen Anderson
Science Museum of Minnesota
120 West Kellogg Boulevard
Saint Paul, MN 55102
Phone: (651) 221-4764
Gretcha@smm.org

Website: http://www.smm.org

Gretchen Anderson thinks a lot about insects. At the Science Museum of Minnesota, where she works as a conservator, pests are one of the many threats to the safe storage of the biology collections. She says, “My job is to make sure specimens are preserved in the best way possible. I conduct 'risk assessment,' looking at the environment, the temperature, relative humidity, light levels, pests, and other factors that can lead to deterioration.”

Until the museum completed its move into a new building situated on a 10-acre site in December of 1999, the Science Museum of Minnesota was located in a pair of smaller buildings in downtown St. Paul. The museum had 3,350 square feet of central collections storage at the previous facilities and was greatly overcrowded. In preparation for the move, the conservation staff helped design a state-of-the-art 11,240-square foot collections storage space and applied for a series of grants for new cabinetry.

In 1998, the museum used an IMLS Conservation Project Support grant to purchase new high-quality cabinets for the museum's collections of mollusks and bird study skins to keep them in a more stable environment and safer from pests. The grant also supported a conservation education component, which was used to purchase video equipment to enhance the museum's visible labs.

The bird study skins and mollusk specimens were formerly housed in 35-year-old metal cabinets with drawers of oak. The cabinets posed two potential hazards for the collections. The cabinets' exposure to pesticides over the years left a buildup of a residue that can interact with objects, and the oak wood of the drawers themselves produces acidic vapors that can damage shells. The new cabinets are all steel and have powder coat enamel. They will be integrated into a high-tech mobile storage system (cabinets on rails) for space-efficiency.

Only five percent of the museum's collection is on display at any given time. Like other museums with systematic collections, the remaining natural history specimens are available for scholarly research. Scientists, such as ornithologists, mammalogists, and entomologists, use the biology collection, as well as artists and other researchers.

Bird study skins enable researchers to gather different kinds of data about species, says museum biologist Richard Oehlenschlager: “With a range of specimens, a person studying species variation can look at patterns in color and size. He or she can measure specific traits that vary within and between species, such as color, wing length, beak length, tarsus length, and tail length. And look at age and growth development. A lot of variation exists…. Some variations are subtle enough that they are determined only with detailed measurement or by some direct side-by-side comparison.” From a theoretical standpoint, these careful comparisons help scientists understand how life on earth has unfolded and changed over time. From a practical standpoint, they contribute to a multitude of applied uses from the conservation of natural resources, to the study of pathology to save people's lives.

Fresh water mussels can be used as environmental indicators by looking at changes in their distribution and correlating their decline with changes in water quality. Museum researchers are currently studying the heavy chemical absorption into shells collected from nearby bodies of water, such as the St. Croix River. Like the rings in a tree trunk, the shells tell of their exposure to chemicals at various stages of growth, allowing researchers to time-date the occurrence of heavy toxins in the water. Providing one of the few clues to the changes in water quality over the years, the mollusks enable researchers to better understand the connection between water pollution and the loss of habitat to ultimately help save native species from extinction.

Oehlenschlager and Anderson are eager to talk to people about the work in biology and conservation that happens behind the public exhibit spaces at the museum. For many years the museum has had a visible lab, a room adjacent to the exhibition hall where visitors can see some of the many ways a specimen is studied and preserved.

IMLS is particularly interested in finding new ways to bring the work of conservators into public view. In fact, Anderson's grant included funds to add a public education component to her project. Anderson plans to use these funds to develop videos and improve the museum's new visible labs.

One of her video ideas has, for the starring role, a subject that is sure to delight (or repulse) any curious youngster-the dermestid colony. Most natural history museums, if they have active bone collecting, or osteology, have a dermestid colony. Also known as carpet beetles, larder beetles, hide beetles, and odd beetles, they are the bugs that finish the work of the biologist to remove any flesh from the bones that are kept in the osteology collection.

For her part as a conservator, Anderson makes an effort to overcome her slight bug phobia: “The dermestid are fairly disgusting, but without them….we would probably be ear-deep in corpses - dead things.” She says that just as a beautiful flower is considered a weed in a vegetable garden where it does not belong, the dermestid can be destructive in the general collections if not contained:

The dermestid, in its niche, is fabulous. You move it into your house, or into your museum, uncontrolled, and it's a nightmare. Once it discovers a food source it will go through it. It makes it very frightening for a museum. It eats fur, it eats wool, it loves feathers, skin, horn, anything made out of protein. It is the best, safest way for the bone to get cleaned, but you've got to keep the little critters contained. What I want to do is a time-lapse video of a bird skin or some feathers being eaten by the dermestid colony. It's what they do naturally, but this is the kind of damage they can do.

When Anderson talks to people about general conservation issues and techniques, such as keeping light levels low in the exhibition hall or protecting a collection from pest infestation, she says she is building support and understanding for the role of conservation in a museum. She says, “I feel like we can offer the public a service….We can get the message across. When people understand the issues that conservators are working with…there's a better understanding of what we see in a museum, and there's a better understanding of what we have to go through to preserve it.”

Update (March 2007):
The Bird Skin and Mollusk project happened just about the time that the Science Museum of Minnesota moved to the new facility (which opened December 1999). The collection was successfully re-housed in Delta Design cabinets on the high density system in the new collection storage room. The environmental conditions in storage are maintained at 45% relative humidity and 68 degrees F year round (not an easy feat in Minnesota).

This project and subsequent projects to improve storage for biological specimens were funded with the help of IMLS Conservation Project Support grant. Since moving to the new facility, the Science Museum of Minnesota has completed the following projects: installed a compactor system for fluid based collections (2000); acquired a major collection of bryophytes (moss and lichen) and housed them (2001); purchased oversized Delta Design cabinets to properly house oversized flat hides (2002); and finally mitigated light in the galleries.

With all of these projects, the Science Museum of Minnesota has continued to expand and develop modular exhibitions about the Agents of Deterioration, including video and web components. The most recent video on light mitigation is being shown both in the Collections Gallery as originally intended and in the museum’s lobby. Finally, there is a newly installed video camera inside the dermestid colony with a feed to one of the galleries and plans to put the feed on the Web site.