Hooked! An update on the IMLS funded Rug Conservation Project

by Nancie Ravenel, Objects Conservator

Shelburne Museum has a sizable collection of rugs, about 450 of them, ranging from floor mats to room-sized. Most depict geometric and floral patterns that were popular when they were made and which were designed to coordinate with specific interior styles. Others are genre scenes, illustrating classic annual events like a Fourth of July picnic or a Christmas party. 


In her home in Westbury, Long Island and at the Brick House, here in Vermont, Shelburne Museum founder Electra Havemeyer Webb used many of the rugs now in our collection on her floors, but at the museum she chose to display them on the walls of the Hat and Fragrance Gallery. Given that these rugs weren't constructed to be hung, they were eventually taken down so that they could be preserved.

Photograph from the Webb family photo album of their house in Westbury, Long Island. Courtesy of Shelburne Museum.

In 1999, the Institute for Museum and Library Services provided us with the funding to hire a textile conservator and conservation technician. Together, they assessed the condition of each of those rugs, provided remedial treatments to alleviate stresses caused by bindings or lining that were too tight, and then rerolled them for storage.


Over the years since then, I’ve put mounts on some of the rugs that are in good condition so that they could be safely displayed in exhibitions. Many of the rugs that the curators wanted to show had condition issues that required the services of a conservator who specializes in textiles. I also felt there were a number of smaller rugs that would benefit from being stored flat rather than being rolled.


In 2013, the museum was awarded another grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to hire a textile conservator for 1 year to examine and treat just less than half of the most important rugs in the collection in the most compromised condition and to construct flat storage to hold 80 of our smaller rugs. To that end, textile conservator Angela Duckwall joined us last May. Because its often useful to bounce ideas off another conservator when developing a treatment plan, the grant also included funding to bring in Museum Textile Services’ Camille Breeze to consult with Angela on some of the stickier issues, as I'm an objects conservator, and while I've got a certain amount of proficiency with textiles, I know my limitations.

Here are some glimpses of Angela at work. Most of the rugs she's worked on will be going on view in a new exhibition in the Patty Yoder Gallery in Hat and Fragrance, opening in May, 2015.
 

Here, IMLS-funded textile conservator Angela stitches a backing fabric to the rug that she has just finished repairing. The fabric is held on a frame with push pins so that she could get the tension just right. She's placing her stiches strategically, taking care not to go through areas that were repaired, not stitching into the fragile ground fabric or the pile elements. Rug: maker unknown, Flower Garden Border Rug, Collection of Shelburne Museum, 1999-5.21
 

Testing various cleaning solutions on blotter papers to see how effective they are against the grime on this rug and to ensure that dyes won't bleed if a particular solution is chosen. Rug: Maker unknown, Baskets and Birds hooked rug, Collection of Shelburne Museum, 1999-5.15; 9-M-91

 
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Nancie Ravenel examines, documents, cleans, and repairs the three-dimensional works of art and artifacts owned by Shelburne Museum. She researches how they're made and makes sure they can travel when they're requested for loan by other museums. With collections ranging from taxidermy to horse drawn vehicles to dolls to bronze sculpture to carousel figures, there's always something new to learn and new challenges with every project. She received a MS in art conservation from the University of Delaware/Winterthur Museum and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation.

Look into our eyes...

Curator of Design Arts Kory Rogers reminding himself of which pieces we've looked at.

In the course of preparing some of the objects from Shelburne's collection for Supercool Glass, curator Kory Rogers and I took a closer look at a collection of prosthetic eyes, normally on view in the doctor's office.  In particular, he was curious about how the capillaries were added to the whites of the eyes, but I found the manner in which the glass worker created the irises to be just spectacular. Here are a few examples of what we saw:

 

One example of what's referred to as a reform-style glass eye. The capillaries are applied as glass threads to the white glass.

Doesn't it look like there are butterscotch starlight candies in this iris?

Most of the eyes in this collection are of the reform style, originally developed in the 1880s by Dutch eye surgeon Hermann Snellen. Reform-style prosthetics are elliptically-shaped convex and hollow. Kory displayed one of these upside down in Supercool Glass to show how these were made. There are also a few examples of shell-style prosthetics in the group:

Two shell-style prosthetics turned upside down.

One of the reasons I find these prosthetics so interesting is that there are so many points of comparison with the dolls' eyes in the collection. Glass eye makers also made doll eyes. Perhaps the most amazing examples of glass doll eyes in Shelburne's collection are seen on the wax-over-papier mâché-headed doll by London maker Anthony Bazzoni, produced c. 1860. As gorgeous as they are, these spherical eyes just don't have the same level of realism as the prosthetics.

Not all glass doll eyes are globe-shaped or this realistic. Eighteenth-century examples of English glass doll eyes in Shelburne's collection are shaped something like cowrie shells. We get the best sense of that by looking at x-radiographs and CT scans.

I think you get the best sense of the shape of the doll's eyes in profile. The tacks around the crown of the head hold a wig in place.

Here's a frontal view radiograph. The wood doll was made in England c. 1720.

Of course, attempts at making realistic eyes in materials other than glass have a long history too. If you want to learn more, check out this post from our colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Museum's conservation lab and their recent investigations of how eyes were made in a group of Egyptian wooden sculptural heads. 

More about LED lighting in Shelburne Museum exhibition spaces

On March 1, 2013, director of Preservation and Conservation Richard Kerschner presented our experiences with using LED lighting in exhibition spaces at a one-day symposium held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lunder Conservation Center in Washington, DC. During his case study he shared how we've used LED lighting in the past here, how various departments are involved in choosing the lighting we use,  and then Rick talked a bit about the efforts involved in selecting lighting for the new Art and Education Center. Here's his presentation:



This symposium, Gallery Illumination: LED Lighting in Today's Museums, brought together lighting designers, conservators, and scientists to discuss the use of LED lighting in museums. Other presenters included staff members from the National Gallery, London, the National Gallery, Washington, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Clicking on the links in the previous sentence will bring you to their talks.

Now hear this: the Artizan Factories A-2 Band Organ

With the museum closed for the season, the question I’m most frequently asked is “What are you working on?” The fast answer is usually objects that need to be cleaned, stabilized, or restored for the exhibitions that the curators are working on. Those are the priority, but- truth is- there are a few projects which aren’t tied to exhibitions that we’ve been working on in the Conservation Department over time. Perhaps the largest (and loudest) is the Artizan Factories A-2 Band Organ, made c. 1927.

The Artizan Factories A-2 band organ c. 1959 when the Dentzel carousel was being taken down

The Artizan Factories A-2 band organ today

This band organ came into the collection in 1961 along with the museum's Dentzel carousel, produced in 1902 for the Sacandaga Amuseument Park. Though it’s not the carousel’s original organ, it is a very rare one and appears to have had little work done to it prior to coming to Shelburne. Artizan Factories in North Tonawanda, NY only existed from 1922-1929, and many of their models that survive now have had their works replaced. This was commonly done so that organs could be made to play more current music. This one survives with its original mechanisms, one song roll, a tuning roll, and painted surfaces. It does show evidence of use, particularly oil splatter from the steam engine that powered it, but little evidence of maintenance.

Director of Preservation and Conservation Rick Kerschner wanted to see if we could get the organ working again but in a manner that would have the least impact on the original materials. With working artifacts, like musical instruments, there’s a paradox – we’d like to preserve the physical nature of the piece but we also want to hear what it sounds like, and by operating it, we’re creating wear and tear. So to get this band organ back into working order and to create guidelines for how to play it in the most responsible manner possible, we assembled a team of experts.

John Watson (left), Bob Watters, and me having a first look at the various mechanisms from the back

Initially the team consisted of Rick Kerschner, me, musical instrument conservator from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation John Watson, and organ restorer Bob Watters. This first team assembled in 2007 to document the organ, and determine what course of action would be appropriate.

Here's the underside of the organ. The pipes are everywhere! Bob Watters repaired two of these pipes that had broken.

 In working through some of the questions that arose during the documentation process we met carousel organ restorer Tim Westman. We then engaged him to perform some of the more complex repairs to the pneumatics which required specialized equipment, provide an electric motor to drive the organ (which was originally driven with a steam engine), and fabricate missing parts for the organ. He also helped us find more music rolls that would work with this organ - they're reproductions with tunes appropriate to the mid-1920s- so that we don't further damage the fragile song roll that came to us with the organ.

I cleaned the façade, which had been stored separately from the organ itself, cleaned the interior of the bellows and the carcass, replaced the deteriorated rubber tubing that no longer provided a proper air seal, and replaced the snares on the extant drum.

I traced and labeled where all the tubing went before removing it.

Here’s what it sounded like after tuning and with the snare drum in place, as Rick was troubleshooting.

Admittedly, there's more work to be done, and we're slowly working towards completion as we work on objects required for exhibitions. The organ came to the museum without a bass drum, and Tim has located a replacement for us and will be getting that to us soon. Though there’s no specific plan to display this carousel organ (yet!), we have played if for occasional public tours of the conservation lab. Keep your eyes peeled for future opportunities.

This work was undertaken, in part, with funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Thanks are also extended to scholar Fred Dahlinger for sharing his knowledge of this organ as well as the Bruder organ which was originally supplied  by the Gustav Dentzel Company with the carousel they made for Sacandaga Amusement Park.

George Washington Like You've Never Seen Him Before!

Though Conservation Fellow Josiah Wagener's project primarily involves the conservation treatment of painted folk art, he took some time out to help me out with the  photo documentation of one of my projects using a new-to-us technology. We're grateful to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for funding Josiah's work here at Shelburne Museum. 

Here's Josiah:

How do you fully document a large counter relief object such as this early 19th century cake mold featuring General Washington?

The cake mold as photographed under normal conditions in the lab.

It has deep shadows, sharp corners, gentle curves, highlights, stains, cracks, grain color, and polishing from past use. How can you get all of that detail in to a simple photograph? Well, instead of a photograph how about an RTI?


RTI, short for Reflectance Transform Imaging, is a technique in which multiple photographs are taken of an object with the light coming from a different direction in each picture. The several photographs are then fed into a special computer program that combines them, reads the surface texture of the object, and creates a composite image with almost 3-dimensional feel.

31 images were assembled to create this RTI

Once the image has been created one can use the viewer program to virtually pan a light across the surface of the digital object, just as one might tilt and rotate an actual object under a light to get the best view of the highlights and details. Here's a screen capture of what its like to look at the RTI using the viewer program:

The RTI documents all the details of the object for posterity.

Although the technology has been available for a few years it is just beginning to see popular use and has never been used here at Shelburne before. Thanks to the work of the folks at Cultural Heritage Imaging, the RTI tools and technique have become much more easily available to anyone who wants to use this powerful technology. I recently taught myself the technique and assembled the necessary (very basic) equipment, and with the help of conservation intern Rosella Fevola,  we successfully created an RTI image of the Washington cake mold on our first attempt.

We intend to keep experimenting with the opportunities and limitations of this technology and find new ways to fit it into our conservation process here at Shelburne.

Art on the Edge

"Is the frame original?"

Whether carved, molded, gilded or painted, picture frames can rise to the level of  works of art in their own right, and can tell us a lot about the context in which a painting was displayed, but it's rare that we know much about how a frame came to be associated with a painting it houses. Frames are not often described or included in catalogs of paintings, and it is common for collectors to change framing when they purchase a work of art or change their decor.

Not long ago, we found ourselves asking, "Is the frame original?" when Rembrant Peale's Woman with the Tuscan Hat, c. 1847 came into the lab for conservation treatment. Both the painting and frame were in dire need of cleaning and repair, so this was an excellent opportunity to look into both of them a little more deeply.

Before Conservation Treatment

After Conservation Treatment

The painting is described in inventories of the artists' studio following his death as "Tuscan Hat, from a composition after André" but there's no indication as to whether or not the painting was framed. The painting came into Shelburne Museum's collection in 1985, and to the best of our knowledge, had only been published once before in John Mahey's 1969 article in American Art Journal in which the painting is depicted, but not the frame. 

The frame itself was made in two parts: the outer rectangular decorative moldings and the inner spandrel with  an oval opening. They're held together with nails on the reverse side of the frame. Oddly, the inner spandrel is a bit small for the outer frame; it just barely fills it so that you can see its outer edge peeking out from the opening of the outer frame. It also looks like an ornamental border had been removed from the outer edge of the spandrel. While there were a few empty nail holes that didn't match up between the spandrel and outer frame, there weren't enough for me to say that either piece had been used in some other context.

The pink arrow points to  the edge of the spandrel. The green arrow shows marks made by an ornamented border that was once on the frame and the blue arrow is pointing to cotton tulle applied to the surface of the frame before it was gilded. This image was taken before conservation treatment.

The pink arrow shows a wood splint added to the outer frame's rabbet to hold the  inner spandrel in place.
There's another splint under the spandrel too. Its just a little harder to see in this picture.

The Rococo-style ornament was made using compo, rather than plaster or carved wood. Cotton tulle netting applied to the ornament prior to gilding was a popular technique in the second quarter of the 19th century. And while the spandrel doesn't fit the outer frame perfectly, the compo ornament applied at the corners compliments the decoration on the outer frame. And so the style and materials used to make the frame suggest that it may have been produced sometime between 1825 and 1850, the same period as the Peale's Woman in the Tuscan Hat.

We will probably never be certain when this frame was associated with the painting or whether the outer frame has been reused. If it isn't the first frame this painting ever had, the match is in keeping with the time that they both were made.

If I've whetted your appetite to learn more, you might be interested in these summaries of three thought-provoking talks from this year's American Institute for Conservation annual meeting which considered picture frames and framing and the challenges posed in researching them.

Thanks to conservation department volunteer intern Linzy Vos who performed the conservation treatment of this frame and contributed to the research. Thanks also to paintings conservator Pamela Betts who researched and performed the conservation treatment on the painting as part of an Institute for Museum and Library Services Conservation Project Support grant.

A good trick

I  love working with the curatorial fellows because, invariably, they have a knack for picking objects for their exhibitions that haven't been out on view in a long time. Curatorial fellow Sara Woodbury has chosen a some truly wonderful works for her exhibition on imagined worlds, How Extraordinary! Travel, Novelty, and Time in the Permanent Collection, opening in Webb Gallery June 16.  Sara was in the lab to look at one of these, and we both were so amazed by it, we thought we should share it here too.

Maker unknown, Trompe-l'oeil map, Collection of Shelburne Museum, 27.18-6

It is unknown who made this trompe-l'oeil arrangement of a map of North America written in French and other printed matter and objects. What's so amazing is that it was executed in ink using a pen with watercolor applied with a brush. There's no printing. The support, the material that the work was produced on, is a laid paper, but what look like indentations from a printing plate aren't. They were created with watercolor and a brush. We were examining the work to see if it made sense to treat it to reduce that yellow tonality. In fact, we discovered that the paper was toned to look old. Fake age!

A real red-rimmed paper label on the back of the framing indicates that the work is French and was made in 1779.  I'll leave you with some details and photo micrographs to enjoy, but this really needs to be seen to be believed.

The artist played with depicting the distortion caused by lenses in the lunettes.

At 60x magnification you get a better sense of the rendered optical distortion through the lens. The letters get bigger and the color changes.

A better look at those fictional plate marks.

The depicted plate mark flattens out under 60x magnification. Aren't those rose-head nails lovely?

Looking into the Light

Have you been considering using LED (light emitting diode) bulbs for your home or business? This rapidly-developing class of lighting fixture has generated quite a buzz. Since we've been researching and using LED bulbs in some of our galleries for about eight years now, other museums and collectors have been asking us if LEDs might be right for them too.

LED lights have illuminated the dollhouses and cases in the Variety Unit since 2004

Finding an exhibition design solution.

In 2004 Shelburne Museum installed LED lights in the Variety Unit's doll and scrimshaw cases primarily to solve an exhibition design challenge. While we'd prefer to keep lights out of the cases entirely, it just wasn't possible to light the objects from outside the cases given the relatively low ceilings in this 1835 building. The qualities we were looking for were: no ultraviolet content, low heat and even light. Director of Preservation and Conservation Rick Kerschner looked at a number of options and tested the most promising ones in a mock-up dollhouse room in the Conservation Lab.

Our mock-up dollhouse room with the monitor and some of the lighting options we considered

If you're interested in the details, he outlined his process in a presentation at the New England Archivists Meeting at Simmons College in 2008, now available as a podcast.

Ultimately, Rick settled on LED bar lights from Prolume. There were several reasons for selecting this company. Their bar-shaped fixture was a size and configuration that met our needs. The small company was also willing to create a light that was the appropriate color (3000 degrees K) and intensity to show off the collections to their best advantage. In addition, Prolume guaranteed that there would be no significant drop-off in the amount of light emitted from these bulbs for 10 years and that the light would not decrease by more than 50% for 15 years. Unfortunately this first generation of LED lights didn't live up to the estimated longevity and lost most of their light after only a few years of use. Prolume honored their guarantee and replaced all of the lights with their third generation LED bar lights containing diodes manufactured by Nichia. These new LED fixtures have been in place for over three years, and we have seen no loss in light intensity.

Note the differences in color among the first generation LEDs (top) versus the third generation LEDs (bottom). The diodes on the bottom are more uniform in color in contrast to the lights on the top. Its subtle, but it makes a difference.

So how many museum professionals does it take to screw in a light bulb?

In fall, 2010, Efficiency Vermont offered the museum a sweet deal - a full rebate on all the LED lights we cared to purchase (but only until December 31, 2010)! While conservators love free stuff just as much as anyone else, there were questions about the nature of the light emitted by LED lamps as compared to the more commonly used incandescent and halogen lights. We needed to know whether the light generated from the LEDs would be any more damaging than the light generated by the halogen lamps we were used to. Additionally we wondered if commercially available LED lights had the same color and intensity consistency that Rick had been only able to achieve for the Variety Unit cases by working directly with the manufacturer.

So as other institutions, including the National Gallery in London and the Getty Conservation Institute, were looking at commercially available bulbs in their labs to determine how the nature of light generated by an LED compared to fluorescent and incandescent lamps, Rick did some practical research in our galleries. He mocked up up comparisons and showed them to the electrician, exhibit designer, curators, director, and anybody else who had an interest in how the buildings were lit. Although Rick paid close attention to the color rendering index (CRI) of the LEDs, in the end, what was most important was how the artifacts actually appeared under the lights. Informed by the research done at other institutions and our own mock-ups, Shelburne Museum staff decided that the Philips EnduraLED MR16 and Sylvania UltraLED PAR 20 and PAR 30 LED replacement bulbs worked best for responsibly displaying our collections in our buildings with low ceilings.

Rick Kerschner, Exhibit Preparator Doug Oaks and Electrician Rick Gage have been generally pleased with the performance of these bulbs over the 2011 season. In total Shelburne Museum received over $50,000 worth of bulbs through Efficiency Vermont's "free LED" program. Rick estimates the yearly energy savings to be about $6,000; so payback will take about 10 years. Although the bulbs are rated for about 40,000 hours (or slightly more than 32 Shelburne Museum seasons) Rick is not convinced they will last that long. It remains to be seen how cost effective these bulbs really are.

More links to sources of information about using LEDs for exhibition lighting can be found on the American Institute for Conservation's website and within the LinkedIn Museum and Art Gallery Lighting discussion group. The Getty Conservation Institute's Guidelines for Selecting Solid State Lighting for Museums is available on request from their website.

Caring for your Heirloom Quilts

We get inquiries in the conservation lab fairly often about how to hang heirloom quilts. Director of Preservation and Conservation Rick Kerschner wrote up these suggestions a few years ago and we've been distributing them on request.

I have a few cautions about mounting quilts on the wall. Once a quilt is mounted on the wall, it tends to stay up for a long time. Most textile conservators recommend limiting exhibition to 6 months to a year. At Shelburne, we take our quilts down every few years (we are only open 6 months a year) and rotate new ones onto display. I would encourage homeowners to also implement some reasonable schedule to rotate a quilt back to storage for at least an equal amount of time that it is being displayed. In general, we prefer to cover our quilts with Lexan (polycarbonate), Mylar, or Melinex whenever possible to protect them from dust and handling. I am sure that you probably have good filters on your furnace to filter out dust, but dust that is kicked up from the floor that never makes it into the HVAC system can still be a problem. For that reason, I would recommend that the bottom of the quilt be at least 2 feet above the floor.

Cleaning a quilt that has been hanging
1.Obtain a piece of plastic window screen and bind the edges so that they will not snag the textile.
2. Lay quilt flat.
3. Place the window screen on top of the quilt and, using a brush attachment on a HEPA vacuum with suction control set to low suction, vacuum both sides of the quilt. Avoid rubbing the brush attachment against the screening.

Vacuuming a quilt through a screen

Light and your quilt

Be sure to mount the quilt away from daylight, not just out of direct sunlight from a window, but away from any significant window light. Actually, the highest light levels are recorded in a home during the winter when the sun is low in the sky and can shoot in windows, and when there is snow on the ground to reflect the light into the house. Daylight will fade certain dyes on antique quilts very quickly, and can cause deterioration to fibers on fabrics that contain metal based mordants (iron-based mordants are found in brown-dyed cotton fabrics of the late nineteenth century). It is fine to light the quilt with track lights, but they should be mounted well back from the quilt (about 5 feet) and low wattage wide floods should be used to illuminate it (35 to 50 watt tungsten floods are best - the old fragile looking frosted kind, not the newer halogen lights, as they have too much UV radiation). If you can feel any heat on the back of your hand when it is held in front of the quilt, the lights are too close. It is better to try to get a low, even light on the entire quilt using several floods than to use one or two bright halogen bulbs and have too much light in some areas and a spotty appearance. It would be best if the light track could be on a separate switch so that it can be turned off without making the entire room dark.

Check with a conservator in your area for additional advice and ask to have light levels measured for the final installation. A conservator can be located through the American Institute for Conservation Referral Service.

Displaying quilts

Finally, there are other ways to display heirloom quilts:
1. Lightly folded at the bottom of a bed
2. Draped over a wide tube (6" diameter or more) mounted parallel to the wall (this displays half the quilt at a time and the quilt can be easily turned so that the other side is exposed to the "elements." No Velcro or other mounting mechanisms are required for this display method).
3. Very fragile and precious quilts are usually lightly folded in long and narrow acid-free storage boxes that can be stored under a bed or on a high closet shelf and brought out only occasionally for special guests. 

There are a number of other good resources on caring for heirloom textiles available on the internet. In particular, there are good general guides to caring for textiles on the American Institute for Conservation's website and the Textile Museum's website. The Philadelphia Museum of Art shares some of their techniques for storing historic garments and accessories on their site and the Minnesota  Historical Society shares their tips for storing flat textiles in boxes.

A Long Recovery for a Secretary

Shelburne Museum was fortunate to come through Tropical Storm Irene unscathed. Many of our neighbors, especially in the southern part of the state, were not so fortunate and our hearts go out to them as they cope with the aftermath of this disaster of historic proportions.

As Vermonters have tried to come to terms with the damage wrought by Irene, comparisons to the Great Flood of 1927 have often been made.

The 1927 storm is the stuff of legend. Over three days in November, it destroyed over 1000 bridges, miles of roadways, and countless structures. Eighty-four people died as a result, including the lieutenant governor. UVM's Landscape Change Project includes many amazing pictures of the devastation in 1927 and what those very same places looked like in 2004. It is interesting to consider those images and amazing that we can still find evidence of that disaster in a piece of furniture in our collection.

In 2000, the museum acquired a piece of furniture that still bore damage from the 1927 flood. The bookcase and drop front desk, or secretary, made c. 1820-1840 by Royalton, VT cabinetmaker John Marshall (1787-1860), was donated to the museum by a descendent of its maker.

The bookcase portion of the John Marshall secretary before treatment in 2000.

The desk portion of the John Marshall secretary before treatment in 2000.

Made of rosewood and walnut veneers on poplar and pine, almost none of the original finish remained, either having been removed by water damage or an aborted attempt at repair and refinishing. All of the glass panes on the bookcase doors, except one, were lost. Half of the green wool cover, called baize, on the desk writing surface was lost; the other half was moth-eaten and faded. More challenging was that about 15% of the veneers were lost, including a large chunk of the book matched burl was missing from the top drawer front. Burl veneer is difficult to cut and thus is thicker. The chances of finding a contemporary piece of wood veneer that would be a good match would be slight at best.

Rather than using wood to fill this loss, I worked together with then post-graduate conservation intern Michaela Niero to make laminated paper veneers painted and varnished to imitate the burl, based on a flipped digital image of the remaining burl veneer on the opposite side of the drawer. We created paper laminate veneers that replicated other veneer losses too. The paper laminate was cut to fit and adhered in place using a reversible adhesive. While it would have been wonderful to use wood, the paper laminate is a pretty good visual replacement. The curators also asked me to replace the missing glass, drawer pull, and the baize as well as refinish the piece so that its surfaces looked appropriately uniform. A local wood turner made the replacement pull for the desk, appropriate glass was found at architectural salvage shops, and green baize was acquired for the desk top. An isolating layer of varnish was applied to the wood surfaces before new layers of varnish were applied to harmonize the disparate wood colors and uneven layers of varnish.

The secretary after treatment in 2000.

The secretary is now on view in the Dutton House. Though its not the same as it would have been had it not gone through the 1927 flood, it does have a very special provenance.

If you have works of art or family heirlooms that got wet during Tropical Storm Irene, there are a number of resources available to help you salvage (if they're still wet or muddy) and find help to conserve and restore them.

Upcycle/Downcycle

Electra Havemeyer Webb laying out flattened hatbox panels in Hat and Fragrance Gallery, c. 1953

Upcycling: transforming a useless object or material into a product of better quality or use. Downcycling: converting a useless object or material into something of lower quality or use.

There’s no doubt that Shelburne Museum founder Electra Havemeyer Webb was ahead of her time in many ways. While she collected works made by everyday Americans, not all of those objects ended up being museum pieces quite in the manner we think of today. In fact, sometimes she found new uses for historic objects in her collection.

Let’s consider the hat and bandboxes. In Shelburne Museum’s collection, there are approximately 200 nineteenth-century oval lidded boxes made of wood or cardboard covered with block printed paper designed to store hats and other accessories. Mrs. Webb began collecting them early on.

"For years and years I collected hatboxes. I don’t know why, don’t ask me...I think they are so interesting in design and also I think they have great educational value," she said.

Certainly the collection contains some with great stories, such as “Peep at the Moon” as told by Curator of Design Kory Rogers:

“Peep at the Moon” retains its original form, but other hatboxes that Mrs. Webb collected found new uses. I haven't counted how many she flattened to create decorative paneling in two rooms in her home in Westbury, Long Island. Scalloped paneling in one room was constructed of yellow hatbox sides. The other room was produced from sides and lids of blue hatboxes. More panels from flattened boxes are on view in the Hatbox Room in the Hat and Fragrance Textile Gallery. She laid out the arrangement herself while the building was being constructed in 1953.

Mrs. Webb's yellow hatbox room in Westbury, Long Island

While preparing the collection during the renovation of the Hat and Fragrance building I noticed that some of the boxes had been flattened once and then returned to an oval shape later. Sadly, Mrs. Webb did not describe her criteria for conversion, but there are multiple versions of the same papers represented as both whole boxes and flattened panels.

Blue hatbox room in the process of deinstallation from J. Watson Webb's home in Los Angeles, CA, 2000.

When the Webbs moved from their Westbury residence, son J. Watson Webb, Jr. took the hatbox wall paneling - a blue room and a yellow room - and installed it in his home in Los Angeles. After his death in 2000, the paneling was donated to the museum and I was part of the crew who disassembled the paneling to send it to Vermont. Like previous Shelburne Museum workmen who moved historic structures to the museums grounds, we numbered and photodocumented the paneling as we removed it from the house.

As the conservator in the crew, my job was to record how the paneling was constructed and to ensure that the paper and moldings were sufficiently stable for travel. You’ll find the blue hatbox room panels on view in the Museum's Hat and Fragrance Gallery. But the yellow room? It became the top border and backs for the trivet cases in the Variety Unit, a decorative arts gallery next door to Hat and Fragrance. In creating these cases, the carpenters added new wood to the old and didn't alter the joinery in any way. If desired, the cases could be disassembled and reconfigured as paneling once again.

The yellow hatbox room in the Variety Unit, where trivets are on display, 2011.

With a little help from my friends

At the recent American Institute for Conservation's annual meeting, I participated in a panel discussion, specifically to talk about how I, as an objects conservator, care for Shelburne's textile collections while two other conservators, a paintings conservator and an objects conservator who works primarily on African art and artifacts made of many different materials, both in private practice, discussed their approaches to the conservation of textiles.

Backing up a bit, my title is "objects conservator" which means that I work on three-dimensional works of art and artifacts. In my graduate school work at the University of Delaware/Winterthur Museum program in art conservation, I cycled through courses focused on the science, history, and conservation of the world of object and material types: paper, photographs, textiles, paintings, wood and furniture, metals, leather and other organic materials, ceramics, stone, glass....and at Shelburne the collections demand that I draw on the full range of what I was taught. But really, there's more to all of this than anyone could learn in just three years of graduate school, and so I continually build on that body of knowledge by reading, going to conferences, attending workshops, and talking to colleagues so that I can do my job in the most responsible manner possible.

The panel discussion is summarized on the American Institute for Conservation's blog, and mostly I talked about the various kinds of collaborations I enter into with conservators who specialize in textiles, as well as volunteers, in order to care for the museum's quilts, hooked rugs, clothing, and upholstered furniture collections.

Recently, though, I entered into a new kind of collaboration, one with an artist/designer, the results of which are on view in In Fashion.

The hats in In Fashion were a whole lot of fun to work with. The pieces in the show from Shelburne's collection run the gammut of materials: straw, glass, plastic, ostrich feathers, reed, silk...even pipe cleaners. I mended broken feathers and made replica gems to replace missing ones. And as fabulous as the pieces from our own collection are, the pieces made by Don Marshall on loan from designer Susan van der Linde are fantastic, in that mythical Pan's Labyrinth kind of way. How were designer/preparator Doug Oaks and I going to show off these amazing but incredibly fragile works of art off to their best advantage?

Hat by Don Marshall being test fit to the mount in the conservation lab

Fortunately Susan van der Linde had already come up with a marvelously elegant solution for her own hats. Designed by the architecture firm Bade Stageberg Cox, the mounts that Susan uses in her own showroom were exactly the kind of solution we were looking for. Described as a surrealist twist on the milliner's head mold, the mounts are made of intersecting pieces of painted plywood. Although these "heads" are smaller than a human head, their design offered opportunities.

Susan van der Linde's mounts with polyethylene foam wedges covered in surgical stockinette support this hat by François on a jaunty tilt

I saw that, when necessary, I could slot in supporting fabric covered wedges into her mount's design for Shelburne's 19th and early 20th century hats in the exhibition. The green silk and reed calash was especially fun. For this mount I built a variation of a storage mount used for this kind of hat at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston that would slot on to Susan van der Linde's mount.

The modified wedge for the calash as it was being developed

So, thanks, Susan, for allowing us to use your mounts for the show. And thanks also to my colleagues for their willingness to help me think through some of the issues posed by the collections at Shelburne Museum.