17th Century Painting on a wall - how to preserve????

[bournonite]

So it seems the weight of opinion is more recent than was thought.. Which explains the ho. hum attitude of the conservators from the council.. Its still a nice thing to have in your bedroom, even if the kids have kicked the hell out of the lath...
If I analyse a paint sample, what am I looking for - lead??

 

[Gervase]

If you're having the paint analysed to date the picture, the chemist will be looking - for example - for evidence of azo dyes, which will put it post mid-19th century, and of polymer binders, which would put it post mid-20th century.

 

[Geoffrey]

I'd want to preserve it whatever the date - It's an atttractive thing to have in a room!

As for pot spotting!!! Just when you think you've seen it all.

Still - each to their own.

 

[Nemesis]

Ah yes - the pot spotting site.

From the small print:

Note : To all those who have hit upon this site while searching for information on pots and pans, pot plants, pot bellied pigs, Pol Pot
or pot smoking, the CPSA regrets to inform you that you are in the wrong place, but you are of course most welcome to take a look
around anyway. The CPSA also advises that much of its web site apart from this sentence is best taken with a pinch of salt.


http://users.breathe.com/yorick/potspot/index.htm

 

[Nemesis]

Ruryl idylls:
The last farm in Surrey is to be sold.

All farmed out and nothing to grow
Adam Edwards


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/global/2006/08/19/pfarm19.xml

Despite claims that Helen Allingahm romanticised the rural Surrey landscape, a careful look at her paintings of barns and cottages will reveal that she painted them in closely studied detail, at a time when many were under threat of demolition and 'improvement'. I suspect that they are a fair depiction of wobbly roofs, natural materials, vernacular architecture at its best and age worn charm. Clearly in need of uPVC windows and spray on foam. Ruskin was a great admirer of her work.

From page three of the article linked to above:

'Flora Poste and Cold Comfort Farm have come to symbolise the lot of the sophisticated Londoner surviving in the countryside.

Despite the fact that rural living is now more comfortable than it ever has been, and certainly much more so than in the 1930s, when Stella Gibbons wrote her seminal novel, modern metropolitan men and women continue to maintain an obsession with imposing urban taste on country properties.

According to interior decorator Joanna Wood, no re-invented farmhouse in the South-East is now complete without:


An outbuilding that has been transformed into a gym
An indoor swimming pool
Swathes of cream silk draped all over the living room
A huge eat-in Smallbone kitchen
Sub Zero fridge
Low-voltage lights
French range cooker recommended by a celebrity chef
Underfloor heating
Antique French oak floors
A 4x4 in a heated garage
A quad bike
A designer dog (not a working dog)
A boot room with endless Wellingtons in all sizes that nobody dirties '

I'm afraid that 'something nasty in the woodshed' these days may well be the massive oil tank.

Helen Allingham 'On Ide Hill'

Helen Allingham 'Valewood Farm'

 

[bournonite]

Magnificent....

Wish I'd lived 100 years ago... doubtless there were negatives, but beautiful all the same. I'm chasing a suitcase full of photos taken of my place in the 1890's at the moment - will be interesting to see what it looked like...

 

[Gareth Hughes]

It's not Rex Whistler either!

ah, Rex Whistler, now you're talking!

http://www.ellensteiber.com/sources/whistler.htm

A town I could spend months in.

As for the "17th Century" mural, well, the style's wrong, the costumes are wrong, the whole feel's wrong. No reason to dismiss it though, after all, in 300 years' time it'll be over 300 years old.

 

[Nemesis]

Well now that's amazing - just been reading your mills stuff in SPAB Cornerstone and was about to e-mail you and say how interesting it was.

Clearly telepathy...

Whistler's murals, paintings and theatre designs were something rather splendid, weren't they?

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-plasnewydd/w-plasnewydd-rex_whistler.htm

Yes, an interesting piece of decoration, worth preserving, but I wonder when people began putting arches over garden entrances and swathing them with roses or whatever? The romantic garden vision?

As you say - too much all wrong, it's a nice piece of imaginative painting - wonder if by the lady of the house?

House, stable (or smithy) inn (see board at side and table round the tree) serving wench, and the huntsman in hunting pink. Stooks in the field, sheep in the fields, God's in his heaven... and Georgette Heyer is proably just round the corner.

 

[Lynn]

I can maybe see the appeal of train spotting, but chimney pots?

Anyway it is too bad that mural is on the plaster. Looks like a difficult situation. One might assume (and it might be a bad assumption I don't know) that the picture depicts what was on the farmstead at the time and so dating it would require finding out when it looked that way. Backtrack through property boundary changes?

I was just admiring our post office mural in town that dates to FDR and the depression era of putting people to work and trying to get art into small towns all over the US. I couldn't find our mural on the web, but there is this example:

http://www.wpamurals.com/Linclntn.htm

Ours too is on canvas and has been restored. The subject is the Blackhawk war...our little part in the history of genocide/Indian displacement. Too bad we don't have it on the web because it is quite beautiful. I suppose I could post it to our community blog with a story linking to these other sites who are much more heads up about things.

 

[biffvernon]

What interests me about the Allingham pictures is that, along with a lack of uPVC windows, there is very little sight of white paint on the window frames. This might be historically accurate or it might be Allingham's artistic licence. If the latter, then perhaps we ought to follow her tastes and stop painting our exterior joinery. But I think it is likely that she was recording what she saw faithfully. Cherry Tree Cottage, Chiddingfold is an exception where a white painted frame shows she was not averse to using some white paint. On the other hand it might be argued that the inclusion of a white painted window was indeed artistic licence in this case as it balances the white cherry blossom.

 

[Nemesis]

I think she probably painted what she saw - and I agree. I doubt paint was cheap, I doubt the windows (which in the main I suspect were oak) required it. Maybe a quick limewash which wore off?

Her paintings showed waves of tile, rough thatch, mossy roofs, rickety barns - there's no hint is there of tidying any of it up? I think Ruskin's admiration of her would have been lessened if he thought she was painting 'chocolate box' scenes.

More here:

http://www.helenallingham.com/ThumbGallery.htm

Not much romanticised here, is there? The muck heap, muddy puddle... clearly a barn ripe for conversion, with a zillion Velux rooflights and a carriage lamp.

Helen Allingham A Kentish Farmyard

 

[plumbers mate]

Thanks for the pot-spotter link, the booklet is printing off as I type.

Sad, but I do have 10 in the house and four in the back yard) as well as those on the roof). A visitor thought it rather odd to have a row of chimney pots in the main hallway ..... don't they know it's the latest design craze?

What is the best way to mend a yellow clay chimney pot - for ground level, non-chimney use ?? One of them is a pot of three halves.

 

[Nemesis]

Araldite?

'The CPSA also advises that much of its web site apart from this sentence is best taken with a pinch of salt.'

 

[plumbers mate]

oorhh....
I want there to be a pot spotters club, I want there to be eccentrics who walk around looking at chimney pots. We need people like that!

Chimney pots are becoming a thing of the past, new houses don't have them and they are being removed from stacks on old houses.
Many are fine examples of the clay worker's/firer's art.

A national chimney pot museum is what we should have.

(Incidentally having them just insde the front door makes a really useful dumping place for junk mail , storing wallpaper rolls, umberellas etc. Add a piece of slate to the top and you have a table that would be worth thousands if seen in the Conrad shop...... )

Long live the potty pot spotter.
[[ Lots of emoticans could go here but I don't like them ;-) ]]

 

[Nemesis]

http://www.redbankmfg.co.uk/brochures/chimney/chimney.pdf

 

[Nemesis]

And:

(we have one of these... although I think the bloke wot made them has retired and alas no longer available...)

http://www.erringtonreay.co.uk/company_web/er/story4.htm

 

[Nemesis]

Compare:

Milton's Cottage
http://www.helenallingham.com/GalleryPictures/HE05.htm


with:

http://www.miltonscottage.org/about_miltons_cottage.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/threecounties/do_that/lit_map/bucks_lit_map.shtml

 

[biffvernon]

Comparing the photo and painting of Milton's copy certainly lends credance to this quote from the Helen Allingham website:

The old thatched cottages that stood for hundreds of years were now being modernized or even demolished at a rapid pace. Helen set out to immortalize these ancient bastions, capturing every detail in extraordinary accuracy with a warm, sympathetic style unmatched by other artists of the time. She traveled the countryside, staying just ahead of the builders and wrecking balls, painting outdoors with a pallette of just nine colors. While she would add figures and occasionally reverse modernization by restoring thatch or window latticework, she was careful to keep idealization to a minimum. To this day her works are studied by architects to better understand the construction techniques of a lost time.

I think she may have given the horizontal timber in the gable end a slight droop to the left but she certainly seems to have painted what was in front of her pretty faithfully.

 

[Nemesis]

Annabel Watts did some research to try to find as many of Allingham's cottages as she could - there's a book of the results.

 

[Jocelyn]

My neice is married to Helen Allingham's neice and has two or three originals hanging in her house and as for wall paintings, well--- we know where the real ones are.