Recently, I read two novels which feature conservators—“Triple Take. A Museum Story”, by Robert Barclay, former senior conservator at the Canadian Conservation Institute and “The Last Painting of Sara De Vos”, by Dominic Smith, a novelist who looked to Stephen Gritt, Director of Conservation at the National Gallery of Canada for “insights into the technical aspects of conservation and restoration”. In each novel, the technical descriptions are the most accurate and believable aspects of the story.
Just two examples. In “Museum Story”, the senior conservator at the Canadian Museum of Personkind uses vacuum impregnation to treat a wooden rattle that had been badly damaged by insects. “For objects in this condition, soaking with resins in solution under laboratory conditions is essential. But it takes a good deal of courage. Stephanie (the conservator) was only too aware that she was about to alter permanently a museum object and do something to it that was potentially dangerous to its future wellbeing. There would be no going back.” In “The Last Painting of Sara De Vos”, Dr. Helen Birch, the conservation scientist at the Art Gallery of New South Wales has studied and analyzed three paintings, one of which the reader knows to be a forgery. Birch instructs the curator (who was the forger of the painting forty years earlier) about the manufacture and use of lead tin yellow and then says, “When I run the elemental analysis on the one on the left, study the gritty yellows, it show a fair amount of silica dioxide—the main ingredient in sand. Whoever made this one used sand to try to get the same textured feel, but the metal soaps give it away. There are no lead soaps in the fake from Leiden.”
The reader who begins these books looking for light entertainment may finish them not only entertained but with an appreciation for the difficulties and complexities of conservation and conservation science.
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AIC Blog Archives: Conservators Converse
Former Blog of the American Institute for Conservation