Conserving a frame at Kentchurch Court

My assignment at Kentchurch was to conserve a picture frame. The frame was very old carved wood, and gilt. I also researched the painting itself, since the family knew nothing about it; who painted it? who are the two men in the painting (the sitters)? why are they shaking hands with their left hands? when was it painted, and to commemorate what event? I made some progress with these questions when I finally got to see the picture in person, and made a stab at reading the piece of paper affixed to the back, with spidery writing explaining much of it. Anyway, the process is as follows.

The first thing to do was assess the damage and figure out what to do. Then I started removing the thick layer of bronzing powder with q-tips and a acetone. It came off pretty easily, and revealed several gilding layers of slightly different colors underneath. Apparently the bronzing powder had been slathered on to cover up the missing gesso and bare wood.
The damage was extensive and all over the frame. What happens is that gesso, which is sort of like plaster, is very susceptible to fluctuations in humidity. The gesso moves with the changes, the wood moves with the changes, but they don't move together, and after a hundred years of this, the gesso just starts cracking up and falling off.

The first step to applying new gesso is to paint rabbit skin size onto the bare wood, which reactivates when the wet gesso is applied and adheres the gesso to the wood. Then I melted gesso in a beaker and painted it on, layer after layer, until it was the same thickness as the old gesso. Then I sanded and smoothed the gesso with sandpaper and spit.
Here's the pot of gesso. Just a reminder, in case you forgot, gesso consists of rabbit intestine glue and ground up chalk, warmed up in a baby-bottle warmer.


There were two areas of the inner frame (the slip) that needed material filled in. To do this, I made up a small batch of West Systems epoxy, which contains glass, and used a spatula to apply it to the gaps. I used a piece of Perspex (plastic) to back the material, and left it to dry overnight. The next morning, I shaped the curved front surface, using a scalpel, rifle files and fine sandpaper. The tiny little gaps I filled with a product called Fluegger, a white goop that you can shape with your fingers.

There were three buds missing from the bud motif on the slip. To replace them, I first made a mould out of lab putty. I mixed it up and squished it on top of a good bud, let it cure for an hour, and

trimmed it. Then I warmed some composition over a double boiler, pressed it into the mould, and made three buds, which had to be trimmed to fit the particular areas missing buds. I used hide glue to affix them.

Here we have a section of gesso work, built up, sanded and ready to be in-painted. Then follows a picture of the in-painting and the toning of the in-painting!
The most tricky part of the whole endeavor was the in-painting of the gesso. At first I thought I would be replacing the gilding, but the course leader decided that in-painting was adequate. Not that it was easier....! I spent more time imitating gilding than I ever would have spent gilding.
The process was artistic in nature rather than structural; the structural work was done. First I painted all the gessoed areas with an orange gouache that I mixed using sepia, raw umber, yellow ochre, madder, and the like. Then I put darker layers on top, trying to imitate the gilding. My first attempts looked like a brick wall, but then I thought of the shapes of the eastern U.S., and that helped. It took quite a while to get it to match the old gilding and the dingy look of the old surface.

Here I am in the drawing room with three other frame projects going on and a £70,000 oriental rug under our feet. We were pretty much freezing our asses off the whole time, hence the four sweaters I'm always wearing!
The lighting in the hallway proved to be very different from the drawing room I had been working in, and it wasn't until I put the new chain on and could hang it up that I was able to do the finishing touches. The big problem was getting the gesso and gouache, which are matte, to look consistent with the old gilding, which was (sort of) shiny. It was helped with a tiny bit of pearl lustre bronzing powder added to the gouache.

Here it is. I started Monday afternoon and was done Friday afternoon, and put in 37.5 hours in all. I really enjoyed the process. Had I been able to take it into the workshop at University, I would have stripped off all the gesso and completely regilded it. But to do the work at the stately home was a great experience, with the limitations that go with working in situ. It is this kind of experience that is very difficult to find, but very important to give a person flexibility and ingenuity.






The answers to the questions posed at the beginning: the two men are a Mr. Scudamore, landowner, and a Mr. John Watts, curate. The writing on the back identifies them, more or less, and seems to be saying that the former gave the Kentchurch Parish living to the latter. The artist remains a mystery. The frame, I have just deduced from research, is probably the same age as the painting (about 1690), a Lely-style frame very typical of the mid-to-late seventeenth century, with acanthus flower corners, cinque-foil flat flowers, and mirror sections (uncarved) that should be burnished to reflect more light onto the painting. It's a pine frame, very delicately carved, and wouldn't it be fun to bring it back to its original glory, freshly gilt and burnished! As for the handshake, the curator at the National Portrait Gallery, to whom I showed a photo of the painting, told me that the handshake is left-handed for compositional beauty, and that's it. The person seated on the left is always the more important person, and it wouldn't look very good if his own arm were blocking his body! No wonder my research turned up nothing whatever on left-handed handshakes.