Horses and Calligraphy

On arrival

Condition

This is the hardest ink on paper job to have come through the studio. Black mould had taken most of the top half of the sheet, and black mould is a different proposition from the brown foxing that turns up on most works. It does not sit on the surface being unsightly. It digests the paper, and where it has been working long enough the sheet gives way underneath it.

The work had also been framed directly against its glazing. Over years in a humid room the paper had adhered to the glass in large patches, so before any treatment could begin there was the problem of separating the two without taking the ink surface off with the glass.

Part of the calligraphy had gone. Not faded, but lost with the paper it had been written on.

What we did

Treatment

The work came off the glass first, worked in small areas rather than lifted, since the sheet was at its weakest exactly where it was most firmly stuck. That stage cannot be hurried and largely determines whether the rest is possible at all.

The mould was then treated and the sheet cleaned, followed by remounting onto new silk. On a work this fragile the mount is structural rather than decorative: it is what allows the paper to be handled at all afterwards.

The missing characters were recreated. This is the part of the job that calls for judgement rather than technique, since the aim is a work that reads as the artist left it without inventing anything that was not there.

Further detail

More of the work

These were photographed in one state only, so they sit on their own rather than beside a counterpart. Each is labelled with the state it shows.

The finished work

Outcome

The before images are worth looking at slowly. The work went back as a complete piece, stable enough to hang, with the mould gone and the calligraphy whole.

It is the case we point to when someone assumes a work is too far gone to be worth an assessment. Some are. This one looked it and was not.