The extremely diverse collections at the Soane include stone sculpture, plaster casts, architectural models, stained glass, antiquities, metal work, ceramics, paintings and more. As well as looking after this wide range of objects day to day, the conservation team carry out treatments to individual works of art when required or as part of restoration projects.
Written by Jane Wilkinson, Head of Conservation
During the recent restoration of the Drawing Office, the conservators removed over two hundred objects that were on display in the space. The majority of these were plaster casts of architectural fragments and while they were off display we took the opportunity to clean and where necessary stabilise and repair them.
Before work could begin, painstaking preliminary research helped suggest the best methods for treating the casts. Intriguing information gathered from nineteenth-century bills and curators’ diaries revealed how and when they had been painted, washed or repaired in the past.
Because, wherever possible, we always want to return restored objects to how they would have looked in Soane’s lifetime, we first looked at contemporary watercolours of the rooms. Scientific analysis further confirmed our belief that the casts – and the frames of those that had them – had originally been cream-coloured.
Before starting work, several treatment options were weighed up. Should we be stripping them back, repainting them or simply cleaning them? Because the casts had a build-up of at least four layers of paint, we first considered removing later layers to reveal an earlier scheme. However, physical tests revealed that these earlier layers were discoloured by dirt and darkened by lead in the old paint. This convinced us that the best approach would be to preserve the latest paint layer on each object. Luckily, most casts still had an appropriate cream-coloured paint finish, in many cases dating from the end of the nineteenth century.
One of the works of art we treated was this cast of a sixteenth-century panel of an arabesque ornament. Having been displayed high on a wall since the early nineteenth century, the cast was extremely grimy with a particularly sooty back. The loose dirt was first of all removed using a soft brush and a vacuum cleaner, after which the paint surfaces were cleaned with saliva and swabs. The paint on many of the casts is soluble in aqueous solutions so using saliva, which has a low water content, is the best option as it minimises disruption to the paint. This was a painstaking process but it yielded great results.
The frame on the cast had been painted grey in the 1970s and this needed to be repainted to match the colour of the cast. The grey paint was very water soluble and in the process of cleaning the frame, prior to repainting it, we discovered an old number painted on the lower edge. This number was the correct one for the object (this isn’t always the case) and was most likely applied in the nineteenth century, so we decided to preserve it.
With cast cleaned, frame repainted and a few small areas of damage repaired and retouched, all that was left to do was to check the nineteenth-century fixings were safe and add the object number on the side of the frame as part of our object identification system. Finally, after a lot of painstaking work, it was ready to go back on the wall for another hundred years!
