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- UD grad interns help preserve mummies, spacesuit, other cultural treasures
- Bringing a saintly portrait back to life in Missouri
- Conserving a knight's shield from ages past
- Käsebier photographs conserved at National Gallery of Canada
- Examining ancient Egyptian mummies at the Walters Art Museum
- Restoring Southwestern pottery at the Arizona State Museum
- Caring for Maryland's first settlement, Armstrong's spacesuit
- Preserving masterpieces at the Walters Art Museum
- 'Big Four' railroad magnate's paintings undergo conservation at Yale
- Studying indigo dyes at the Smithsonian
- Treating a Moorish Islamic ceiling at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Editor's note: The Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation is one of only five graduate-level conservation programs in the United States. Graduate students in the program spend their third year in an advanced internship at museums and studios around the world.
Here, Cynthia Schwarz reports on her work at Yale University Art Gallery.
10:31 a.m., March 19, 2009----As part of my internship at Yale University Art Gallery, I am working on the conservation of a group of architectural paintings that were donated to the university in 1926 and will be exhibited for the first time in 2011. The paintings were commissioned by railroad magnate Collis Huntington in 1893 to hang in his palatial New York City mansion on 5th Avenue, now the site of Tiffany & Co.
Huntingdon was one of the “Big Four” who helped build the Central Pacific Railroad, which was part of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. He also helped develop the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. The city of Huntingdon, West Virginia, was named in his honor.
Huntington commissioned some of the most respected New York muralists of his day, including Elihu Vedder, H. Siddons Mowbray, and Edwin Blashfield. The conservation project includes 28 lunettes and two large ceiling paintings. Many of the paintings are in the same condition as they were when they were removed from the walls of the Huntington mansion and are in need of extensive structural and aesthetic treatment.