Conservation

A Letter From Helen Keller

Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Thu, 05/16/2024 - 10:57am

The Morgan holds in its collection two letters handwritten by Helen Keller in 1890, one of which is currently on view in the East Room of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library. Keller’s lifetime of accomplishments, despite having lost her sight, hearing and speech at a very young age, are already familiar to most people. Yet this letter, written when she was only ten years old, provides extraordinary material evidence of her determination to overcome barriers to communication and engage with the outside world.

An Invitation to Peep: Paper Peepshows from the Eighteenth- to Twentieth-Century Western World at the Morgan

Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Fri, 09/08/2023 - 1:00pm
The city street in eighteenth-century Europe was a bustling place with crowds, merchants and all sorts of entertainment, among which was the peepshow. A peepshow involved a box with at least one viewing hole, through which a series of images, spaced sequentially, could be seen. Such boxes were carried around by the showmen who were also the narrators, offering a more interesting experience. For people back then, these boxes were portals to distant landscapes, foreign continents, or battlefields.

Bound for Versailles: Investigating the Jayne Wrightsman Bookbindings Collection

Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Wed, 06/23/2021 - 2:54pm

In anticipation of the upcoming exhibition Bound for Versailles: The Jayne Wrightsman Bookbindings Collection, on view June 25 through September 26, 2021, our conservators from the Thaw Conservation Center took a close look at techniques used in creating these elaborate works of art.

Color and Curious Creatures: Fifteenth-Century Block Books at the Morgan

Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Wed, 07/08/2020 - 7:00pm
The Morgan owns the largest collection of block books in North America and they were some of J. Pierpont Morgan’s earliest acquisitions. These are books in which both the images and the text are carved from a single woodblock, hence the term block book.

Color and Curious Creatures: Fifteenth-Century Block Books at the Morgan, Part II

Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Fri, 08/21/2020 - 11:52pm

An earlier post discussed some of the traditional colors that appear in the Morgan’s block books. In most cases, the hand-applied colors are typical of the dyes and pigments seen in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. However, a few unexpected pigments were discovered during the study of these fifteenth-century books, enabling a better understanding of how some of them were changed over the centuries.

Color and Texture: An exploration of Ashley Bryan's collage papers

Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Fri, 01/13/2023 - 10:55am
Brightly colored collage of figures in several boats with yellow and orange sails on water depicted in dark and light blue waves with a pink sky in background.

This is a guest post by Lindsey Tyne, Conservation Librarian, NYU Libraries

Ashley Bryan (1923–2022) used colored and hand-painted papers cut into the shapes of people, ships, water, land, and sky to create the collages that fill the pages of Sail Away, 2015, as printed images. When these eighteen collages (2021.25:1–18) entered the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum in 2021 as a gift of the Ashley Bryan Center, I was drawn to the rich colors and textures of the collage papers and immediately recognized one paper, Canson Mi-Teintes®, by its distinctive honeycomb texture.

Conservation treatment of Haydn's The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on The Cross (Cary 508)

Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Mon, 07/17/2017 - 12:16pm

In 1786, the Clergy of the Cadiz cathedral in Spain commissioned Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) to compose The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross. In 1791, a copyist’s manuscript of the full orchestral score, with annotations by Haydn himself was prepared for a series of concerts to be held in London.

Corners and Edges: The Physical Evidence of Édouard Vuillard’s Sketchbooks

Submitted by Thaw Conservati... on Mon, 04/05/2021 - 10:12pm

Several of the drawings included in Édouard Vuillard: Sketches and Studies come from sketchbooks spanning the artist’s entire career with dates as early as the 1890s to the 1930s. This exhibition provides the unique opportunity to learn about Vuillard’s preferred sketching materials. While preparing the drawings for installation, I looked for connections between them, with particular attention to similarities and differences in the physical evidence.