Month: August 2018

Work Placement in the Prints and Drawings’ Department

This June I was lucky enough to spend two weeks working with Richard Farleigh, Conservator of Works of Art on Paper, as I undertook my training placement at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. I have been living and training in Cornwall as a Books and Archives Conservator for just over a year now, having left my posts at the Fitzwilliam Museum in June 2017. It was a real joy to be able to return to the museum this year in a new guise, with new skills and a fresh perspective.

Carrying out my placement in the Paintings, Drawings and Prints Department (PDP) over a two-week period provided a unique opportunity for me to work alongside the Fitzwilliam’s paper conservators whilst also assisting the Department’s technicians with the installation of a new temporary exhibition. Whilst I cannot include in this blog post all that I have learnt, below I have picked out a few highlights from my time at the Museum. Before I tell my little story, I would like to thank the team for making me feel so welcome. It was a real pleasure to work with colleagues, old and new, and to gain such a breadth of experience through doing so.

My first week was largely spent assisting the Department’s technician team with the exhibition ‘Floral Fantasies’, now on display in the Shiba Gallery until 9th September 2018.

Myself and PDP technician Richard Carpenter carefully pinning a mounted watercolour executed on vellum in position. PD.880-1973 A bunch of flowers including peony, roses, hibiscus, asters and gentian by Pierre Joseph Redouté (Flemish, 1759-1840).

It was hugely valuable for me to work on this installation due to the range of objects and materials involved, each presenting its own challenges for mounting and display. It was exciting to see innovation at work in the Museum, particularly in terms of new mounting techniques and the use of acrylic to create bespoke cradles for the paper-based collection and the museum’s precious miniatures.

A cradle made in house using a laser cutter for displaying a complex paper- based artefact (credit: John Lancaster, Manuscripts and Printed Books technician). In this instance for a Valentine by unknown maker, early 18th century. P.14622-R Cut paper, with applied silk and metal leaf (folded).

Coincidentally, my placement fell just at the moment a large consignment of some 80 art works, a loan show, Degas: A Passion for Perfection returned from the Denver Art Museum, USA. I assisted with the unloading and then helped the technician team return the full transit crates to one of the Museum’s picture stores.

The Museum had used a number of shock loggers, packed inside selected crates which monitored shock magnitude in real time.

A small but clever tracking device. This is one of several Shock loggers that travelled from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK to Denver Art Museum, USA and back.

Some of the works, be they pastel drawings or three dimensional sculptures, are inherently fragile. Information from the Shock loggers was relayed to designated recipients who were then able to monitor levels of shock and/or excessive vibration during the long journey.

I also assisted the conservators and technicians in unpacking several of the crates and then helped to condition check a number of Degas drawings.

Carefully unpacking one of the transit crates which contained several drawings slotted vertically.

It was interesting for me to understand how the Museum manages its various loans and to work through the procedures for condition checking. Later in the year in Cornwall I will be delivering  a training session regarding best practice for display and will certainly be able to include many of the tips that I picked up whilst working in the PDP Department.

Inspecting the surface of a chalk drawing by Degas, using a strong raking light to check for any perceivable change in the condition. PD.25-1978 Portrait of the Dancer Jules Perrot, by Edgar Degas (French artist, 1834-1917).

During my second week I was able to spend time at the bench in the conservation studio with both of the PDP paper conservators. With the Conservator of Prints, Harry Metcalf, I tried my hand at inlaying prints from parts of the collection currently not on display.

Inlaying a print: accurately marking the aperture around the boarder.

I also worked with Richard Farleigh on the mount cutter to learn more about the various house-styles for mounting up drawings. I made a mock-up of a mount for my own print and practiced other techniques using Japanese paper hinges. As exhibition preparation falls outside the remit of our conservation studio in Penzance, it was extremely useful for me to exercise my mounting skills. I now understand how to provide safe and lasting housing for paper-based collections, and how to select the most appropriate display methods.

As I came to the end of my placement, it was a real joy to work in the studio with Rosie Macdonald, a contract paper conservator. In collaboration with the Applied Arts conservators, Rosie is conducting a survey of the condition and the conservation needs of the Lennox-Boyd collection of fans, a recent bequest of 435 folding fans, 10 screen fans and 178 single leaf fan designs. I helped with the survey and the cleaning and packing programme. Fans are complex objects often made from a variety of materials including paper, bone, gems, metal leaf and textile. Their conservation and storage needs are challenging, as Rosie explained.

M.120-2015 The escape of Mary Queen of Scots from Lochleven Castle (a detail), French circa 1790. In this particular case the primary support is not paper but silk with a printed design, applied sequins and metal inlays on the bone sticks. The repair needs of the fan (considerable!) were considered and the time required to undertake the work was estimated.

Careful thought has also been given to the method of packing. Each item is wrapped in acid-free tissue, folded (importantly not rolled) in such a way that the fans are still partially visible through a layer of tissue, whilst also being supported by multiple layers of folded tissue underneath, forming a cushion.

Surface cleaning using a conservation sponge and soft brush to lift dust and dirt.

My return to the Fitzwilliam, albeit brief, has really allowed me to supplement my training in Cornwall by broadening my skills in both paper conservation and exhibition planning and preparation. I would like to give special and sincere thanks to Richard Farleigh for organising my placement and for taking time out of his busy schedule to pass on his skills and provide opportunities for me to collaborate with colleagues.

Until next time Cambridge….

 

Hollie Drinkwater
New Starter Trainee
PZ Conservation C.I.C.

 

Glass Iridescence – Deliberate or deterioration?

I’ve recently enjoyed making an interesting connection between our Roman glass collection and a beautiful display of Tiffany and Loetz glass that is part of the Frua-Valsecchi collection. You can see this for yourself in our Cypriot gallery.

Valsecchi glass display in the Cypriot gallery

Much of the Roman glass in our collection displays a pearlescent sheen known as iridescence. Although beautiful, and copied by 19th and 20th century glassmakers such as Tiffany and Loetz, this wasn’t deliberately produced by ancient glassmakers, it is the result of the deterioration of the ancient glass.

Iridescent glass vessel
Early Roman bowl found in Leukolla Cyprus, GR.101.1876

What is Roman glass?

The major component of glass is silica, found in sand. The melting point of silica is 1600-1713oC, which is too high for production in simple glass furnaces (about 800oC) so an alkali is added to reduce the melting point. In Roman glass this was soda, which is found in many naturally occurring salts. Lime is also needed to stabilise the material. This is found in many sands. Soda-lime-silica make a very stable form of glass.

Much Roman glass is slightly blue or green; this is caused by small quantities of iron in the natural materials used in glass making. Other colours could be produced by choosing particular sources of sands that contain different minerals.

Deterioration

Although largely stable, our Roman glass has had to contend with many challenges to survive to the present day. Vessels may have been physically damaged during use, at the point of burial or during excavation. Prolonged contact with water is also a significant challenge to the chemical stability and surface appearance of the material (take a look at a previous blog post where one of our conservation students worked on part of the glass collection).

Water leaches the alkali (soda) from the surface of the glass, especially in slightly acidic burial environments. This leaves behind fine layers of silica that can flake off the surface. The iridescence is purely a visual effect; in the same way that water droplets in the air cause rainbows, light is bent and split into its separate colours as it passes through the thin layers of deteriorated glass and air.

Surface of deteriorated glass showing pitting and flaking

Copying history

Tiffany – Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer well known for his work in stained glass. In 1865 Tiffany travelled to Europe and visited the Victoria and Albert Museum (then the South Kensington Museum). Here he was struck by the colours of the Roman and Syrian glass collections, reflecting on the “rich tones” achieved without the use of paint. It is likely that Tiffany did not recognise the impact of deterioration on the appearance of this material.

Vase, Favrile glass. Louis Comfort Tiffany. Lent to the Fitzwilliam Museum by Massimo and Francesca Valsecchi.

The Tiffany Glass Company was established in 1887 in New York, but he was working with glassmakers at more than one Brooklyn based glassworks prior to this. In the early 1890s, Tiffany patented the Favrile glass making technique, which was heavily influenced by the appearance of ancient material. Multi coloured iridescent glass was produced by mixing different colours of glass together and spraying metal solutions onto the hot surface of the glass before the vessels were blown. The glassmaker Arthur J. Nash developed this method, passing it on to his son Leslie Nash. They kept the recipe a closely guarded secret that even Tiffany did not know.

Iridescent vase. Loetz, Austria. Lent to the Fitzwilliam Museum by Massimo and Francesca Valsecchi.

Loetz – A glassworks was established in Klostermühle (today called Klášterský Mlýn) in 1836. This changed hands several times until it was bought by Frank Gerstner and his wife Susanne Loetz in 1851. Loetz was the widow of a glassmaker and ran the business for 20 years after the death of her second husband in 1855. The business was then transferred to Loetz’s son-in-law Maximilian von Spaun in 1879. Working with the glassmaker Eduard Prochaska, he modernised the factory and developed new glassmaking techniques.

In 1897, von Spaun, saw Tiffany Favrile glass exhibited in Bohemia and Vienna. This inspired him to focus production on Art Nouveau style glass, which led to the most artistically significant and profitable period of the company’s history.

 

Being able to make this type of comparison of objects from widely separated time periods is one of the joys of working somewhere like the Fitzwilliam Museum. Come and take a look for yourself in our Cypriot Gallery.