Page 26 - The Hunt - Spring 2021

(Previous page, above and below) Winterthur’s Mina Porell works on an 18th-century painting by William Williams with help from Matt Cushman, conservator of paintings.
In the textiles labs, conservator Laura Mina works on a printed fabric that needs cleaning.
“A rule of treatment is to never do anything you Acan’t reverse,” she says.
s natural light streams from a canted window in Winterthur’s library building, Mina Porell hovers over an ailing 18th-century canvas. At times, the conservator uses a medical surgeon’s
scalpel to remove flecks of flaking paint, the high-magnification lenses of her eyeglasses
extending mantis-like from her face. For the moment, though, she’s gently applying a mild solvent with a Q-Tip. Her patient is David Hall Jr., frozen in the same stare since the 1760s, when painter William Williams first put brush to canvas.
Repairing works of art and craft is an art form in itself—one that also employs science and philosophy. The former allows for an accurate diagnosis. The
latter comes into play in the attempts to resolve the conservator’s eternal dilemma of whether to restore or preserve. Finally, there’s the skill and the vision needed to adhere as closely as possible to what the original artist or craftsperson intended.
In the Brandywine region, no one practices that combination better and more rigorously than the conservators at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, where the program is headed by Joy Gardiner, the Charles F. Hummel Director of Conservation. Gardiner is also an affiliated assistant professor with the University of Delaware’s Department of Art Conservation, and her students take classes at the museum. “We have about 20 people working here at Winterthur, in addition to the students,” says Gardiner. “The conservators work on pieces the museum owns, and we also bring in pieces from the outside, often for teaching purposes.”
Conservation work is done on the two top floors of the Winterthur library building in a series of laboratories arranged mainly according to various
24 THE HUNT MAGAZINE
spring 2020