Severe mould spotting and discolouration
Tiger in Ink
A Chinese ink on paper tiger, carrying severe mould spotting and an overall discolouration, cleaned thoroughly and given a new backing.
On arrival
Condition
Mould spotting covered the sheet, dense enough in places to read as texture rather than as separate marks, and the paper had discoloured overall to a tone several shades warmer than it was painted on.
The subject makes the damage more obvious than it would be elsewhere. A tiger is built out of controlled tonal washes, and spotting across those washes flattens the modelling that gives the animal its weight.
What we did
Treatment
The sheet was surface cleaned and the mould spotting reduced through a staged washing process, then given a fresh backing to hold it flat.
Ink of this kind is stable, so the work is a question of lifting what has grown and settled on the paper without disturbing what the artist put there.
In detail
Before and after
Detail 02
Detail 03
Detail 04
The finished work
Outcome
The ground is clean and the tonal range in the animal reads again. The detail images show it best: at full size the spotting was reading as part of the fur.
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