Maxfield Parrish panels return to Delaware for TLC

Matthew Mickletz and Yeonjoo Kim work on restoring one of the Maxfield Parrish murals at Winterthur Museum.

10:25 a.m., July 9, 2004--The story of three murals by famed artist Maxfield Parrish, now being restored by UD’s Department of Art Conservation, is an odyssey linked by a series of serendipitous coincidences according to conservator Joyce Hill Stoner.

Painted in 1932 for Irenée du Pont for the Aeolian organ alcove at Granogue, his Delaware home, the murals featured a mountainous landscape in the background with large urns in the foreground. In 1999, Stoner visited Granogue to view the Parrish paintings, and du Pont mentioned that the panels had been replaced by the artist because the originals were completely unstable. Stoner, who is professor of art conservation at UD, said she assumed the first paintings were lost and gone.

Some months later, Stoner was visiting the Getty Conservation Institute in California. During a ride back to her hotel, she mentioned the murals, and a voice from the back seat announced, “My mother knows where the original murals are.”

The speaker turned out to be Alma Gilbert-Smith’s daughter, Maria. A collector of Parrish’s art who has written books about the artist, Alma Gilbert-Smith had bought Maxfield Parrish’s home and studio in New Hampshire in 1978 and found the murals stored in a dark corner of the studio. She donated them to the Precision Museum in Windsor, Vt., along with an extensive collection of tools, which had belonged to Parrish. The curator agreed to have the panels restored, but since the focus of the museum was machine tools and industry, this was a low priority for subsequent curators, and nothing was done.

The murals, with their Delaware connection, became a quest for Stoner, and she and Alma Gilbert-Smith journeyed to the Precision Museum and discovered the panels on top of some file cabinets in the unheated, non-air-conditioned attic of the museum.

From left, Megan Companion, Kesha Beavers, Joyce Hill Stoner, Hillary Kidd, Andrea Youngfert and Lenora Costa .

The panels presented a challenge, Stoner said. Much of the paint was missing and what remained was like small loose cornflakes on the canvas. Stoner said she thought the panels would provide an excellent project for art conservation students at UD. Alma Gilbert-Smith and her husband, Peter Smith, said they felt that the “opportunity to give the murals a chance to be saved was too good to pass up” and consequently bought them back from the Precision Museum.

The murals arrived at Winterthur in May 2001. Tatiana Bareis, a graduate student in the program at that time and currently a Kress Fellow at the Hirshhorn Museum, did initial photo-documentation of the murals and a cross-sectional analysis of the many layers of Parrish’s paint. The artist painted a blue background and built up the canvas with layers of other colors to achieve his effects.

The conservation project began by relocating and turning over paint chips using tweezers. Then ethylene vinyl acetate (BEVA 371) thinned with petroleum benzine was applied and allowed to dry. Next a tiny tipped tacking iron warmed and uncurled and coaxed the softened chips back on the canvas. Finally, inpainting was done in areas where no paint was present. “We used the Italian technique of ‘tratteggio’,” Stoner said, “using tiny vertical brushstrokes of color which when seen close up are clearly restorations, but from a viewing distance add to the overall effect of the painting.”

Megan Companion

For the past three years, teams of students have worked on the panels, which are marked in grids by cords suspended over the paintings. “It’s slow, painstaking work in small areas, and it’s a good way for students to discover whether or not the field of art conservation is for them,” Stoner said.

Two of the panels have been restored, and one is undergoing treatment. Eventually, plans are under way to show the murals in a traveling exhibition to be enjoyed by art lovers and fans of Parrish.

Article by Sue Moncure
Photos by Kathy Atkinson

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