From an Amsterdam 'Excavation'

April 8

What happens when an old restoration breaks? Sometimes you want to save it as part of the history of the object.

Here is an interesting blue-glazed buff earthenware charger bought in Holland which is almost 35% plaster restoration. 

This restoration might have been done about a hundred years ago and I would say it was a nice restoration. 

Then, the charger was broken into fragments again. Whoever tried to repair it was not finding it very easy to glue together the plaster restoration. Perhaps a few people attempted it with various glues.

So, what do you do now? The plaster is very nicely shaped with nice replication of the pie-crust edge and embossed punts. Before I did some surface cleaning on the majolica fragments, the blue colour looked well matched.

I'll be posting progress on this object as I treat it. The first step will be to remove paint and shellac from the original material. Then it will be stabilized - the joins, both majolica and plaster, will be reinforced and filled.

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April 15

This 2nd picture shows the same charger surface-cleaned, reinforced, filled and the plaster repair re-saturated on the surface. 

The change of vibrancy of colour is perhaps not as marked in real life. The lighting and camera used were different, I must admit; but there is a marked improvement in detail both on the original material and the repair. The surface dirt had been giving it a sickly cast.

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April 22

Here's the charger after touching up the in-fill and an overall microwax.

Help Me Find a Restorer!

So you want to find a restorer. A good restorer.

The best way to do this is to ask a museum near you. Period.

First of all - there are not a lot of restorers. They don't have enormous advertising budgets, or luxury-rental studios. A good word-of-mouth reputation is their best billboard.

On the other hand - museums will know the ones who work commercially or in-house (and take on work in their ha-ha, spare time). They have a little list - really...and they have standards.

So call a local museum and ask for the conservation department. If they don't have a conservation department ask for the curator of the collection. Ask if they have any names of people who can repair/restore/conserve -  whatever you have.

Some china halls, jewellery stores, or silver plating studios will quite often offer a repair service. It could save you the leg-work of visiting the restorer yourself, because they do it. Restorers might have odd locations or hours - especially ones who work in a museum part-time; but stores have to stay open. Bear in mind that you'll be paying a lot more for their 'middleman fees' and you might have to wait a long time for the estimates or work. A store would have to collect enough jobs to make the trips back and forth viable and an extra person to do it.You also won't be able to talk to the restorer directly about what kind of repair is possible or what your expectations are. 

Why Restore Something?

Usually 'restoration' refers to the art of improving an object's appearance; but restorers also stabilize and strengthen objects, removing accumulations of dirt or repairs that may injure an object.

Stablility is important, even in an old repair, because it is movement between the pieces or replaced material which will wear away the precious original material. The more of the original that you have - the better chance of treating the object to preserve it for the future. 

The owner of an object might not always think in terms of heritage concerns - but are led by sentiment and/or guilt. They might only wish that regaining the original appearance of the object by any means is the priority.

A good restorer follows a code of ethics regarding the treatment of objects and their repair. They have to be a 'doctor' to the object which is their 'patient' - not the owner. This means that they might decide not to treat an object at all, if at this moment in time the old repair is stable. They may also decide that less paint is preferable to the original surface even if the repair is still seen or that old adhesive or in-fill must be removed and replaced.

Here's an interesting case that came through the studio in recent years. The picture you saw above is the finished product. When the object came in, it was extremely unstable and many of the old in-fills were crumbled away. There was a lot of movement between the pieces and alignment of them was quite questionable.

After all the pieces were freed from old adhesive and fill, it was found that the object was pieced together from shards of at least 2 - 3 ewers without almost no registration between many of the parts. The 'antique' was a 'marriage' of parts.

This was not from a museum which might have had other shards awaiting identification. It required a great deal of 'fudging' and in-fill to make the ewer look like a reasonable object.

As you can see from the top picture - we had a happy ending, after all - and this was accomplished without the addition of paint over any original material.