Displaying items by tag: restoration

This photograph shows staff at the Rijksmuseum holding their breath as Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642) is unrolled on its return to the Amsterdam museum in June 1945, at the end of the Second World War. The work had been shipped to Kasteel Radboud in Medemblik, north of Amsterdam, for safekeeping. Since its wartime evacuation, the canvas has been subjected to two assaults by members of the public, the most recent in 1990, when a “confused” man sprayed it with sulphuric acid. Fortunately, the substance did not penetrate the varnish.

If Henry and Mary Lily Flagler were to walk into their music room at Whitehall today, they would feel right at home.

That’s saying a lot, considering that Whitehall, finished in 1902, has withstood more than a century of weather and wear. To reverse the inescapable ravages of time, the Flaglers’ Beaux-Arts mansion has undergone an extensive 15-year conservation effort.

The Yale Center for British Art will reopen to the public on May 11, 2016, after completing the third phase of a major building conservation project. Visitors to the renovated building will experience a stimulating new installation of the Center’s unparalleled collection of more than five centuries of British art, largely the gift of the institution’s founder, Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929).

The Long Gallery, located on the fourth floor, will be wholly reconfigured, returning to the architect Louis I. Kahn’s original conception of a study gallery, with over two hundred works installed from floor to ceiling across seven bays.

Visitors to the 16th-century Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, home to a spectacular cycle of wall and ceiling paintings by Tintoretto, are now able to view these masterpieces in a new light—literally. The 25 pictures in the Sala Superiore (upper hall) are being transformed by a project to clean centuries’ worth of grime from the sculpted marble that surrounds them, while a new LED lighting system has been installed in the Sala dell’Albergo. The three-year restoration project, which began in 2014, is sponsored by the luxury Swiss watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre.

The Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Fla., is lining its domed music room with newly restored seating that had long been shedding bits of gilding and threads from its tapestry upholstery. Meanwhile, the once-prominent original supplier of the furniture, Pottier & Stymus, is re-emerging from obscurity.

The oil and railroad magnate Henry Flagler and his third wife, Mary Lily Flagler, bought roomfuls of Pottier & Stymus furnishings around 1902, as Mr. Flagler’s longtime favorite architecture firm, Carrère & Hastings, was completing construction of the couple’s showplace Beaux-Arts house.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has lent one of its great treasures—Johannes Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c. 1663)—to the National Gallery of Art in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the landmark Johannes Vermeer exhibition, which opened here in November 1995 before traveling to the Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague, in March 1996.

This luminous masterpiece, recently restored at the Rijksmuseum, will be displayed through December 1, 2016, in the Dutch and Flemish Cabinet Galleries. It will hang with Vermeer paintings from the Gallery's own collection, including Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664) and Girl with a Red Hat (c. 1665/1666)—the latter newly returned after being featured in Small Treasures, an exhibition shown in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama—as well as Girl with a Flute (1665–1675), attributed to Vermeer.

Eli Wilner & Company recently completed the restoration of an important period frame for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Curator Mark Cole approached Wilner with images of the period frame on Gilbert Stuart’s Portrait of Elizabeth Beltzhoover Mason, circa 1803-1805. The Wilner team identified the frame as an English or early American “Carlo Maratta” style frame, with an acanthus leaf-and-shield ornament applied in a simple cove. This frame style was popular in America in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It was determined that the frame was both appropriate to the painting and likely to be the original, as the museum’s records indicated that the frame had been with the painting for at least a century. Having established the quality and importance of the frame, it was decided that extensive restoration would be appropriate.

St Giles House in Dorset, the family seat of the Earls of Shaftesbury since the 17th century, is the winner of the 2015 Historic Houses Association (HHA) & Sotheby’s Restoration Award. The house was begun under the first Earl of Shaftesbury—a founding member of the Whig party—in 1651, built with elements from a 14th-century manor house that already existed on the site

The prize-winning restoration project was led by the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, who was only 25 years old when he inherited the 5,000-acre estate in 2005, and the Countess of Shaftesbury.

For an all-too-brief span of a few days, New Yorkers had the opportunity to see the original facade inscription of the Whitney Museum of American Art on 8 West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village as it appeared when it opened in 1931. The building now houses the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture.

The incident happened this past Monday July 27 when a sidewalk shed outside the building was dismantled at the completion of a $450,000 restoration project.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London announced that its Europe 1600–1815 galleries would finally open on December 9 following a £12.5m restoration, with £4.75m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The project has been delayed due to a “complicated build”, according to a museum spokesman.

The new display of over 1,100 artefacts, from the museum’s collection of 17th- and 18th-century European art and design, will be complemented by a new commission from Cuban artists Los Carpinteros.