Partners in Conservation 

Through a narrow room lined with antique soup tureens at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Delaware is a portal to a past that isn’t quite as museum ready. In Winterthur’s art conservation department, graduate students from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation study furniture, paintings, textiles, and books in various states of disrepair. They learn about the history, materials, and craftsmanship, then put their skills to the test to bring the worn pieces back to life. 

Marianne Weldon, Bryn Mawr’s collections manager for art and artifacts, trained at Winterthur. Twelve years ago, she helped establish a mutually beneficial partnership between the program and the College’s Special Collections. 

Winterthur selects available pieces from the College that would be of interest to its students. The students research the pieces—noting, in this case, characteristics such as the type of wood or style of upholstery— and share their findings with the College, free of charge. 

“Carrie (Robbins) and I are in charge of 50,000 objects,” Weldon says. “There’s no way we have the time to do that kind of research.” 

Winterthur’s students also have access to professionals at some of the best museums in the country and specialists all over the world, Weldon adds. “It’s a win/win for us." 

Sometimes the College learns more about a piece in its collection, and that’s that. Maybe it’s cleaned, and further restoration is recommended. But sometimes, the students continue to work on and restore a piece during their training, allowing formerly damaged items to be used for teaching or exhibition again. 

Sometimes pieces are taken to conservators for repairs, if it is necessary or time is tight. "What we don’t get when we do that is all the research and analysis that we get from Winterthur," Weldon says, "all the interesting little details about how the artist worked and what materials they used.” 

In September 2022, a chair from the former Deanery was sent to Winterthur for research. Caroline Shaver, a student in Winterthur's program, was interested in studying painted furniture; the chair has painted, turned legs and stiles and was made in India. One of a set of four, it was commissioned by Lockwood de Forest around 1915 as part of his overall design and furnishing of the Deanery. 

“Lockwood de Forest materials at ���������� are unique in that we’re one of the few institutions that has a large assemblage of materials by the designer, for the institution, still at the institution,” Weldon says. 

At Winterthur, the chair was X-rayed to reveal the nails and hidden joinery. Tiny wood chips were examined under a microscope. Layer by layer, fabric, horsehair padding, jute webbing, and metal springs were peeled away, revealing evidence—confirmed by a nearly identical chair from Olana, a historic house museum in New York—that the seat was not the original and had been reupholstered. 

Finding the similar chair at Olana was exciting, says Kathy Gillis, the senior furniture conservator at Winterthur. “I've seen a few Lockwood de Forest chairs in my career … but I’ve never seen one that quite looks like this.” 

Shaver moved on to a job in Ohio, but the chair remains at Winterthur, where maybe another student will come along and take up the project. In conservation, both the research and the work are a long game. 

“A lot of patience is required,” Gillis says.