A new National Trust paint archive will, for the first time, bring together thousands of historic paint samples in a UK facility with a laboratory and archive and staffed by the trust’s first in-house heritage scientist.
With funding awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the archive will be established over the next two years at the Royal Oak Foundation Conservation Studio at Knole in Kent. Paint samples taken from paintings, furniture and interiors at National Trust properties over the past 30 or so years will be available for consultation by professionals, students and members of the public.
Emma Schmuecker, the conservation studio manager, says: “We’ve always sampled things for specific questions about those individual objects, and those reports, those images, those samples exist. Now we want to bring them together so that we can study across them.”
The paint samples are tiny cross-sections of layers of paint and varnish. Viewed through an optical microscope, often in conjunction with chemical analysis, they can reveal the precise composition and application of pigments and binders. They are typically taken in the course of conservation work, when they can be essential in guiding safe and effective treatments.
The samples are miniature cultural assets packed with answers to questions yet to be asked, and the archive raises the intriguing prospect of revisiting older samples with the benefit of current technology and expertise.
Rebecca Hellen, the trust’s senior national conservator of paintings, points to metal soaps, which have emerged over the past 20 or so years as a significant cause of deterioration in oil paintings. “When I first studied painting conservation, nobody really knew what a lead soap was, but now it’s a feature that everybody understands,” she says. “There are probably at least two decades’ worth of National Trust cross-sections which are full of zinc soaps, lead soaps and paint features that nobody’s made a note of because they didn’t know about them.”
Accessing such data is invaluable for the ongoing care of collections, but the creation of the archive makes possible more ambitious, wide-ranging enquiries. “The really fun part is that we’re going to be able to inspire people to think about paint—paint through the centuries, paint thematically, by colour, by supplier—through a global lens or a local lens,” Hellen says.
The project is the latest phase in the development of the trust’s in-house conservation service, set up in 2017 as part of the six-year-long restoration of Knole, which included the opening of the Royal Oak studio. The studio now works across the collections, expanding on the specialist textile conservation facility based at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, since 1976.
The recent conservation of A la Ronde, a house in Devon, shows the potential for paint analysis as a tool for understanding the complex histories of painted surfaces. It allowed Nicola Shreeve, senior furniture conservator at the trust, to show that a set of chairs were part of the original scheme. “I realised that the pigments used for the original painted surface on the chairs matched the original surface on the walls. Not only that, the second overpaint layers on the chairs also matched the second paint layers on the walls,” she explains.
Following the loss of all paper records in a fire, the paint samples are a vital part of A la Ronde’s history. The property is “keen to stabilise the image of the object as it is,” Shreeve says, “because that becomes the archive of the house. All the information about the house is just what’s held in the objects.”
The £621,962 funding award covers the purchase of equipment and the services of a heritage scientist. Eventually, the archive is expected to go online.
