Still Life with Monkey by Katharine Weber

Author:Katharine Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

Laura enjoyed her work in the conservation lab

LAURA ENJOYED HER WORK IN THE CONSERVATION LAB at the Yale Art Gallery. She was very good at her job. She had apprenticed in both painting and object conservation, and was technically proficient in skills that were in incessant demand for the maintenance of paintings and objects, such as Chinese porcelains, in the Gallery collections. Her work was usually devoted to analyzing and assessing condition and damage, after which, with supervision, she conducted certain basic treatments for cleaning and stabilization.

She was occasionally given some restoration assignments for straightforward repairs of damage to paintings in the collection, which often meant the painstaking removal of the problematic older varnishes of the past and the application of new varnish that met contemporary standards. She had a reputation for a very steady hand and good, careful work. She was a generalist, but she had a special knowledge of the issues and materials of seventeenth-century paintings. While getting her undergraduate degree in art history at the University of Connecticut, Laura had thought her devotion to works on paper was immutable, particularly Renaissance prints and drawings, and she had planned to pursue a graduate degree to become a paper conservator. But after a two-month postgraduate internship in the Philadelphia laboratory of Renaissance specialist Carolyn Maybank (who was as overweening as she was legendary in paper conservation circles), Laura never again had the nerve to work with paper.

Exactly what had gone wrong and why, and who was responsible for the fate of the precious Dürer woodcut (St. George and the Dragon) that was accidentally bleached out of existence before Laura’s eyes?

The annoyingly prim Jill Feldman, the other intern (as she and Laura each thought of the other), had been assigned the basic task of creating a simple weak paper wash cleansing solution for the woodcut. She had misread the written instructions in the Maybank Conservation Laboratory Manual of Practices and had added ten full syringes, a total of one hundred cc’s, of ammonium hydroxide to the gallon of water in the tray, rather than ten drops. (To be fair, the instructions were penned in highly ornamented fountain pen script, and the heavy, leather-bound Manual was more like a sacred volume of recipes for Merlin’s spells than it was like a compendium of modern scientific laboratory standards of practice.) Jill had asked Laura if she agreed that this was the correct proportion, but Laura had neither agreed nor disagreed, because she wasn’t listening to Jill Feldman, though this was a matter of dispute later that day.

Laura was engrossed in making diligent notes in her Moleskine notebook about the science of this task, committing to her little gridded pages as much as she could quickly copy from the precious, leather-bound Manual of Practices as soon as Jill had let her take full possession of the volume: Water can cleanse acidity, discoloration, and degradation from paper. Wetting a work on certain kinds of paper can strengthen its structure by re-establishing the bonding of the fibers.

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