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| Portrait of Rachel Beekman Livingston Ripped portrait on left, restored portrait on right |
We tour houses, look at the furniture and paintings, say it’s
pretty and call it a day. What we rarely
get to see and know is what goes on behind the scenes in order for these houses
to look as though they did when they were originally made. What I didn’t quite
know so much about what how much education it takes to become a conservator. To
be honest, I thought you only needed a bachelor’s degree in history. What I now
know is that you need a masters or doctorate degree, and there is a lot of
chemistry involved. Our tour today was more of a behind the scenes tour. It
fascinated me to see how these conservators can take an almost ruined object
and make it look as though it was just bought in the 1800s. In the paintings laboratory,
there is a lot of tedious work going on. I cannot imagine myself working so
slowly to stitch fibers back together for 100 hours. In the ripped portrait of Rachel
Beekman Livingston, the paintings conservator had to reintegrate the fibers
back together to draw the canvas closer. It is just the weaving that took 100
hours. It takes so much time and effort to do these jobs. What I thought was
interesting is that they had a lot of objects from Fredrick Church. One of the
first large scale paintings he did, under the wing of Thomas Cole, is now in
their hands. There is a huge whole in the side of the painting, and they have
to make it look like that never happened. It is frustrating how many people are
involved with the fixing of this painting. Everyone has different ideas of what
should be painted in that missing hole, and it seems as though they may never
come to a conclusion. My favorite part of the tour was in the frame room. The
woman fixing the design of the frame is gluing back on 23 karats of gold. These
slices are so thin, that if it were to get on our hands, it would stick there
and eventually fade away. I was so confused as to why I was watching her whisk
her face, but then I found out the oils on her face is useful in gluing the
gold sheets back onto the frame. The picture shown below is the steps used to
glue the gold sheets back onto the frame. First, she whisks her face to collect
the oil. Then she picks up a piece of the gold sheet with the oils from her
face. After, she uses a paint brush to add some glue to the frame and finally
she carefully places the gold sheet on the frame. This actually seems pretty
fun to do. Although it might seem a little strange to add new shiny gold sheets
to old pieces of gold on the frame, after she finishes, she will tone the
frame to make the colors the same. As I was roaming around I found a sheet of
paper that listed the materials needed to make the glue and tone. For the glue
liquid, the paper says you need about 4 scoops of glue, 3-4 scoops of powder, a
little water and a drop of ethanol. For toning, it says you need ½ of H2O and ½
of ethanol. It was fun learning how to conserve pieces of history. I know Toby
must have been excited when the intern said they use a honey bottle as their pump
to help clean the furniture. It is so intricate, the way they have to restore
the objects they receive, but the materials used are so simple. It must be so
rewarding to finish a piece and be able to finally see it in an exhibit.
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| Steps in restoring frames |
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| Lock #2 |
I have never seen a lock work before, and it was fun to
watch. The lock we went to was lock 2, which is the first lock of the present
day Erie Canal. The lift of the lock is 33.55 feet, and you can definitely see
the drop. The building of the Erie-Champlain Canal was considered impossible in
its time, but it is on and going strong. It took some time for the water to
build up, but I was more excited to see the boat transfer from one lake to
another. These canals open the northern and western frontiers, and changed the
face of America. The lock master was very nice, and he allowed us to go to the
other side to see the difference in water levels. I was so scared because the
difference was so large. Walking across that little bridge killed me and
walking back over it killed me even more because Pamela was jumping and I was
afraid it was going to break. Even though we all didn’t want to get out of the
van once again, I was glad we did.
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