Table Of ContentUpholstery Conservation: Principles and Practice
Upholstery Conservation:
Principles and Practice
Kathryn Gill and Dinah Eastop
O Routledge
S^^ Taylor &. Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published by Butterworth-Heinemann
This edition published 2011 by Routledge
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First published 2001
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ISBN 0 7506 45067
Transferred to digital printing 2005
Composition by Scribe Design, Gillingham, Kent
This book is dedicated to
Karen Finch, Dim, OBE FIIC,
}
Founder of the Textile Conservation Centre,
and its Principal from 1975 to 1986
Contents
Foreword by Peter Thornton ix 5 Reconciling conservation and
interpretation: strategies for
Dedicatee's Preface by Karen Finch xi
long-term display of a late
Series Editors' Preface xii seventeenth-century bed 61
Nancy C. Britton
Editors' Preface xv
Acknowledgements xvii 6 Documentation and conservation of
carriage trimming: the treatment of
List of Contributors xix
a nineteenth-century carriage
interior 74
Introduction:
Nicola Gentle
Upholstery conservation as a practice
of preservation, investigation and
7 Ethafoam® treatments for two
interpretation 1
eighteenth-century French chairs 90
Dinah Eastop and Kathryn Gill
Elizabeth G, Lahikainen
Part One Preserving a mid-nineteenth-century
Object Treatment: Case Histories decorative scheme: conserving the
Morant suite in the Octagon Room,
1 The Ernest Race sHeron' chair and Raby Castle 100
footstool, designed c.1955: an example Lesley Wilson
of conserving foam-filled upholstery 13
Kathryn Gill
Part Two
2 The Lawrence Alma-Tadema settee, Documentation: Case Studies
designed c. 1884-85: the challenges
of interpretation and replication 33 9 Seat furniture at the court of
Kathryn Gill Henry VIII: a study of the evidence 115
Maria Hayward
3 William Burges' Mermaid chair,
c.1870; conserving both original 10 Eighteenth-century close-fitting
materials and later adaptations 44 detachable covers preserved at
Sherry Doyal and Dinah Eastop Houghton Hall: a technical study 133
Kathryn Gill
4 Developments in untacked
re-upholstery: the Denon chairs 11 Evidence from artefacts and archives:
project 51 researching the textile furnishings of
Derek Balfour, Simon Metcalf a Victorian bedroom at Brodsworth 144
and Frances Collard Crosby Stevens
viii Contents
Appendices III A brief object record: the
Upholstery Documentation 175 Brooklyn Museum of Art easy chair 186
Kathryn Gill and Sherry Doyal
I Documenting upholstery: a guide
References 193
for practitioners 177
Sherry Doyal Select bibliography 198
II Example of cross-section diagrams Index 201
to document changes to upholstery
layers before and after conservation
treatment 181
Kathryn Gill
Foreword
It would never happen today, when curators are a close friend - from Nordiska Museet in
appointed to specific posts in museums, Stockholm. In 1961 Elisabet Hidemark published
specially advertised in newspapers and journals. a little paperback on the covering of chairs (it
But in 1954 I was put in the Department of is on my desk as I write: a larger and expanded
Textiles in the Victoria & Albert Museum, after edition came out in 1993) and it inspired me
the dust from a staff reshuffle had settled and greatly. I could read Swedish. It was actually
the vacancy I was finally asked to fill was in intended for ordinary people wanting to re-
that Department. I spent eight years there and upholster their own chairs but it served museum
learned a great deal about textiles - a subject curators very well, too. There was nothing else
about which I had previously known nothing. I like it, certainly not in England.
concentrated on seventeenth and eighteenth At the V&A, however, we had been busy
century materials because that was mostly the collecting information on the subject and now
kind of expertise the public wanted when they Temple Newsam at Leeds, the other chief
brought things to the Museum for an opinion. repository of ancient furniture in our country,
It also allowed my boss and his deputy to joined in the search. A key figure pursuing this
continue with their studies of Oriental textiles, new study was Karin Walton who was writing
Elizabethan embroidery, tapestries and a thesis on eighteenth century upholstery in
Mediaeval materials, all of which were more England (it finally came out in 1980) and she
glamorous and important. did most of the work in putting on an exhibi
In 1962 I moved to the Department of tion there already in 1973 where virtually all
Woodwork (mainly furniture, in fact) and soon the pieces by then discovered were on show,
became aware of how great a part textiles and much information was also assembled and
played in the appearance of furniture and published in a small paperback catalogue
especially of seat-fumiture with its often very (Walton 1973). That was a good start but it
striking upholstery. It was not all 'brown wood' did not attract as much attention as one might
as we used to call it, and I began to try to have expected.
convince people that upholstery actually A major international turning point in the
mattered. It was not irrelevant and something development of upholstery studies, however,
one could send out to commercial upholsterers came in 1979 when a Conference was held at
to do up as they thought fit - which was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Mass.). It
usually in the Victorian tradition, very well was the first conference on the subject ever
made but over-stuffed and quite wrong in style. held. Elisabet Hidemark and Karin Walton
As you of course all know, upholstery can were there and so were two hundred other
totally alter the silhouette of a chair and at people - curators, conservators, interior
many periods did so - look at engravings by designers, collectors and historians. They were
Marot showing chairs with deep valances, so the pioneers of your movement and, in my
very different from so many actual Marot initial address, I even quoted from Henry V
chairs today with their skimpy appearance, the words about those not present thinking
mean little seats and lack of fringes. themselves 'accursed they were not here' at
In the late 1950s I met a young curator - we the Battle of Agincourt. That was a bit over
were both young in those days and she is still the top, perhaps, but it caught the mood of
