Scene 17 – Baluxie Shell Mounds
Today we have a special guest post by Claire Walker, Assistant Painting Conservator at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
One of the questions we often receive from visitors is “What happened to #17?” This scene depicting the Baluxie Shell Mounds has substantially more damage than the other scenes. As the team was rolling the panorama from scene 14 to 18, I was able to get my first close look at scene 17. The area of significant damage began and ended neatly at vertical seams about a quarter of the way into scenes 17 and 18, so this damage was localized not to the scene but to this one panel of fabric.
Seam between Scene 17 and Scene 18.
When you’re within arm’s length, the paint looks very different in this segment—instead of being thin and well-bonded with the muslin canvas, this paint was thicker and had a bright white priming layer, or ground, between the distemper paint and the canvas. The ground layer is brittle and did not stick well to the water-sensitive sizing on the flexible muslin, and when the painting was stressed through constant rolling and environmental changes, the ground fractured and broke off the muslin canvas. In this panel, the losses and islands of paint look like crisp, cracked eggshells, while in the rest of the panorama, the losses look more like worn creases in your favorite pair of jeans.
Priming layer and paint flaking off.
The artist’s choice to use this brittle ground has set up what conservators call “inherent vice” in this section of the painting; the artist has selected or combined materials in a way that builds in structural problems that conservators can’t undo. This panel is the only one made this way, and therefore is the only section that exhibits this kind of damage. Since this panel is made differently, we are treating it differently than the rest of the panorama. Because they are thicker and poorly adhered to the muslin, the flakes of paint that remain require a stronger consolidant to secure them to the muslin. Gouache, an opaque watercolor, is being used to inpaint because it is a safer and more effective application for inpainting around the small islands of original paint.
But how do you know what’s supposed to be there? It may seem like an impossible task, but even in large areas of loss there are still some small pieces of paint that can help guide us in our inpainting. It’s all about recognizing forms, connecting dots and lines, then looking at what you have and seeing what else you can connect. Practice and experience help too, so look for Mark [Bockrath] working to the left of the vertical seam in scene 18.
