Browse Items (19 total)

The condition of this page from Anton Koberger’s edition of Lives of the Saints is not bad considering it was printed more than five hundred years ago. Nonetheless, since that time it has suffered nearly the full range of the kind of damage that…

The principal damage in this study for a woodblock print attributed to Utagawa Kuniyoshi resides in the lower third of the sheet. The stain, typically called a tidemark, resulted from an exposure to moisture, which as it dried deposited a wave of…

This study for a WPA mural, now lost but probably executed somewhere in Michigan (George Fisher was a longtime resident of Detroit), was donated to the Palmer Museum in the condition as it is seen here. The adhesive residue that surrounds—and at…

Gerardo Belfiore’s Watts Street was transferred to the Palmer Museum in June 1994 from the College of Engineering, where it likely had been hanging in an office, exposed day in and day out to natural as well as artificial light, for nearly sixty…

The coloring of this engraving by Giorgio Ghisi represents a conundrum for the museum. The painting of prints—often by artists trained specifically for the purpose—became a common and perfectly acceptable practice as early as the fifteenth…

The complex burn pattern playing out across the margins of Martiniquaise indicates the etching was rematted on several occasions; unfortunately, in each instance with acidic materials. The paper itself is of fairly high quality, so normally we might…

Not all newsprint is created equal. One of the more remarkable aspects of this page from the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari is how fresh it appears. Printed nearly 150 years ago, it bears very little of the yellowing that begins to occur with…

The foxing apparent in Johann Lips’ portrait of Brutus is quite similar to the staining that once compromised the John Frederick Kensett drawing, Catskill Landscape (Palmer Museum of Art, 98.86). Because it remains in an environment that prohibits…

This landscape by John Kensett was sent to conservation in 2009 for the treatment of foxing, pale-orange spots and splotches caused in this instance by the growth of mold. While the mold itself had been mitigated if not completely eradicated some…

This charming portrait of Margot Lux, a neighborhood girl whom Cassatt depicted on many occasions beginning around 1895, came to us laid down on an acidic board and mounted in an acidic mat. Although these materials did inflict a significant amount…