STOP! don't strip that...

[Gareth Hughes]

...non-lime-plastered, plastered wall; non-lime-ash, lime ash floor; or painted exposed beam!

I've had a fascinating day of talks and visits relating mainly to church interiors, but two of the speakers added what was (to me) new knowledge about domestic interiors which had most of us in the audience wincing about the number of times we've seen precisely the things they were illustrating and dismissing them as modern and/or of no importance. I pass these on as it may save things that are under constant threat.

1. David Carrington, of The Skillington Workshop, who specialises in the conservation of church monuments and such things (but also has a passion for lime-ash floors), spoke about the early use of gypsum. Just because it's not lime (especially if you're in the Midlands), doesn't mean it's not early. Old gypsum plaster may be subtly different from modern, but - for example - the infill panels at Little Moreton Hall are largely 16th and 17th century gypsum, not lime, plaster. Gypsum plaster on daub and as a flooring material is found in buildings of every status.

2. Wall painting conservator, Andrea Kirkham, talked about domestic decoration. In Eat Anglia (at least) in the late 16th / early 17th century, it was fashionable to leave internal timbers exposed (ie, not plastered over) and to paint them - black, grey or red seem to have been popular. This enabled the homeowner to create the first impression of better quality (straighter, squarer) timber than might be the case, by carrying the painting onto the adjacent wall surface. They even painted completely fictitious beams on the wall surfaces.

The current taste for assuming (as I had) that internal timbers were usually, historically, covered; and worse, the current fashion for poultice stripping or sandblasting them, is destroying the evidence for these stark but striking interiors. It's also not the case that painted decoration (not only this type, but even more so, the swirls, arabesques and faux-panelling more familiar as wall paintings of the period) is only found in higher-status houses. Anyone who had even a little disposable income (down to the occupants of little two-room cottages) would have popped down to Ye B and Q and got painting.

Even the blank spaces in painted rooms may have formed part of the intended effect - and there are even cases of blank spaces caused by painting the decoration around great aunt Maud's unmovable wardrobe.

Just passing on the info. I'll be looking more carefully in future.

 

[MdB]

Interesting. There is always more to learn.

 

[JoceAndChris]

You've had a fascinating day then - how wonderful to learn all that! As you say, it really changes your perceptions about ye olde DIY - and when we say, on here, that the vernacular farm dwelling or worker's cottage is likely to have received a very plain treatment we may well be wrong then.

Thanks so much for passing it along! And how lovely to have a good reason not to strip the beams or pull up the floor.

I wonder what 17th century gypsum was made of?

 

[JoceAndChris]

Even the blank spaces in painted rooms may have formed part of the intended effect - and there are even cases of blank spaces caused by painting the decoration around great aunt Maud's unmovable wardrobe.

Uh oh. This is too tempting - in the absence of fancy plasterwork I could stencil Greek key design all around every unmovable bit of furniture! You shouldn't have passed that bit along!

 

[robgil]

that is interesting. ive got some quite strange black square ''frames'' painted onto the walls here. there is nothing in the frames. i shall load up some photos when i get a chance.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

You've had a fascinating day then - how wonderful to learn all that! As you say, it really changes your perceptions about ye olde DIY - and when we say, on here, that the vernacular farm dwelling or worker's cottage is likely to have received a very plain treatment we may well be wrong then.

Thanks so much for passing it along! And how lovely to have a good reason not to strip the beams or pull up the floor.

I wonder what 17th century gypsum was made of?

Erm, it was made of gypsum 8) . But having seen a lot of waxed and oiled beams in photos posted here in the last few days, it was the interior decoration that had us all thinking.

There are some parts of the country where the "Great Rebuilding" happened later and where (?therefore?) such schemes hardly survive at all, and areas where timber framing is rare. But because nobody is looking for evidence of this sort of historic decoration, nobody's finding it. So nobody expects to find it, so nobody looks for it...

 

[Gareth Hughes]

Even the blank spaces in painted rooms may have formed part of the intended effect - and there are even cases of blank spaces caused by painting the decoration around great aunt Maud's unmovable wardrobe.

Uh oh. This is too tempting - in the absence of fancy plasterwork I could stencil Greek key design all around every unmovable bit of furniture! You shouldn't have passed that bit along!

This was a lot earlier than Greek Key. The blank bits behind the furniture aren't integrated into the design - it just stops, and starts again on the other side, as though it carried on behind.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

that is interesting. ive got some quite strange black square ''frames'' painted onto the walls here. there is nothing in the frames. i shall load up some photos when i get a chance.

Oh do, please! it seems to be something that's only just being noticed. And Hadleigh provided quite a few of Andrea Kirkham's examples, so you're close to the area where it's definitely known to have been the fashion.

 

[biffvernon]

Indeed.

 

[robgil]

that is interesting. ive got some quite strange black square ''frames'' painted onto the walls here. there is nothing in the frames. i shall load up some photos when i get a chance.

Oh do, please! it seems to be something that's only just being noticed. And Hadleigh provided quite a few of Andrea Kirkham's examples, so you're close to the area where it's definitely known to have been the fashion.

give me a few mins and i shall get some pics. just loading them onto photobucket now.

 

[robgil]

here we go.
these are on a daub wall but i think they are more modern compared to the rest of the house as this half of the house seems to have been modernised some time a few hundred years ago and they are painted onto the joist support beams which is part of a more modern or at least very different ceiling to the rest of the house.
they are painted with a very hard paint that wont scrape off or chip too easily.

we found them when we stripped off layers of chip wall paper.

 

[lou]

I have been really carefully searching for any signs of painting on our walls and woodwork as a house of a similar age nearby has a whole room full of wonderful wall and partition paintings. I have found none but was interested to find behind the victorian tongue and groove that the heavily beamed ceiling each with a stop champfer(I thinkthat's what they are called?) had been limewashed white and the remains of what paint on the bits of remaining plaster are a lovely sky blue. Not what I had imagined in a 15th century cruck hall. However, the post and plank partition wall is unadorned oak. I have taken off the thick black gloss paint from the large beams but couldn't find any other paint colour beneath.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

My first thought is that they may have framed 19th century prints cut from the Illustrated London News or similar, and pasted onto the wall? The schemes we saw today were (or had been) whole-room decoration.
But that is interesting. I hope you'll do some more research and contact people who really know about such things.

 

[robgil]

who can i contact? i noticed the middle one is of a different shape to the square ones on either side. Marias asking me if we will have a conservation order put on the house if we show these to people.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

I doubt very much that, in and of themselves, they'd justify listing. Although (as you know) I think the cottage should be listed anyway - you won't always be its guardian, custodian, protector or whatever. It takes so long to get stuff listed that it really would be worth at least contacting your CO (because if it's important enough, s/he should then arrange to have an expert like Andrea, or Leigh Alston, or whoever, look at it - and you have the bargaining tool that you could hack it all off without permission tomorrow anyway)

 

[robgil]

i shall do just that then Gareth however it might have to wait a while as we discussed via pm? the wall isnt getting any work done to it in the near future and as we are going for listing anyway i think it should be left visible and untouched until such times. Do you think they might want it left as is when it is listed? I can always paint around it.

 

[robgil]

bits of remaining plaster are a lovely sky blue.

I also have a lot of this Lou , apparently it was an ingredient used in detergent and it kept flys at bay when added to limewash but it turned the limewash blue.
there are traces of blue limewash all over this cottage and also some aqua green colours.

 

[jocelyn plummer]

When living in the Holy Land, our humble abode, together with many others in the village was blessed with wall paintings. We were told that the paintings were usually telling the story of the Pilgrims who passed through the village, the fragment in our house showed flowers, dogs, horses and people, all very oddly shaped, so typical of the Medieval artists!
sadly, at some time most of our wall paintings had been covered with cement render, but one or two other properties in the village show some very carefully conserved wall paintings. I believe that Ms Kirkham authenticated 'our' wall paintings when the new owner took over from us.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

i shall do just that then Gareth however it might have to wait a while as we discussed via pm? the wall isnt getting any work done to it in the near future and as we are going for listing anyway i think it should be left visible and untouched until such times. Do you think they might want it left as is when it is listed? I can always paint around it.

I suppose it depends how important it really is, which is difficult to tell at this stage. I'd find it hard to persuade anyone (even me!) to live with some of the very tatty remnants of wall paintings that were shown today, no matter how historically interesting they are. I'm sure a compromise could be found - don't destroy it, but record it, and then make sure anything you paint over the top of it could be removed in future (and we all know that the reason we know about such things, or Nigel's cornice colours, or whatever, is that precisely that process of uncovering again could be, and was, carried out - so it's not difficult. It only becomes a problem if you physically remove something, which is why I'm usually far happier to see new layers being added to a building's history, than old ones being stripped off - for example, someone recently posted, on Nigel's Victorian decoration thread, a link about Castell Coch. You could, if you wanted, remove all the brilliant Victorian fantasy rebuild and still find the very dull mediaeval ruin underneath)

 

[robgil]

the thing about that though Gareth is if its covered over then it might never be revealed again. so you are conserving it but in a sense that it will never be seen again. but i suppose its better than stripping it out altogether.
a nice castle to visit is chillon castle in Geneve , its very old and very untouched and has a lovely history. Its a long drive to get there though but its well worth it.