Smalt at the Warner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2005 by Joyce Geary Volk

With a grant from the Felicia Fund to cover costs, we set the following spring as the time to complete our task. We cleared the room of its furnishings in mid-March 2004, with the kind help of the professional staff of Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth. Swenson and his son Sam and friend Craig Weaver brushed on the dark red. The week of April 12, Swenson, Drew, and Angelopoulos applied the mauve coat and the smalt. They had two glitter guns, one sprayer, and several cloth bundles and feathers. They worked from the cornice down, finishing about one wall each day, so it took them just that one week to complete the work (Pls. II-V). Needless to say, they wore masks, hoods, and sometimes goggles and gloves. And they had fun. Much laughter and conversation accompanied the cranking and spraying. They were fascinated with the physics of the process, finding that the wet paint would seem to be saturated but then some areas would hold more when they went back a second or third time. They applied the mauve paint as evenly as possible, so that the thickness of the paint would not affect the amount of smalt it held. But the variable densities and the resulting cloudlike appearance just seemed to be determined by the properties of the smalt itself. It is the cloudiness that gives the walls a floating quality that is quite remarkable. It is by no means a solid color, but full of random combinations of the mauve and blue. Where the horizontal elements of the paneling collected the most smalt, there is an almost neon glow to the blue. The gentle sparkle of the glass particles in sunlight makes the walls even more unusual (see Pl. VII), but candlelight and firelight would make them almost magical. It is easy to understand why Jonathan Warner chose this very elegant treatment for a room in which he entertained.

Powell had determined that the baseboards in the room were painted a glossy black and that this painted band continued on the door bottoms to circle the entire room (see Pl. VI). It has now been replicated, as has the cedar graining found on the room's three window seats and the ledges just below the windowsills (see Pl. XI). The window frames and muntins had been replaced, so we had no early paint history. We decided to paint them with the plain pale mauve, to give visitors an opportunity to see what underlies the smalt.

Another intriguing discovery was made when Swenson and Drew were cleaning the wood floor after applying the smalt. For many years the floor had been covered with a cut-down, but still large, eighteenth-century Ushak carpet, given to the house in 1938. Swenson noticed there were no nails in the white pine floorboards, and upon investigating we found the boards were joined with dowels set in the sides and that the boards rested directly on the joists. They were of random widths, ranging from 10 1/2 to 18 inches, each around 16 1/2 feet in length, and today, almost three hundred years after the house was built, they remain 1 1/4 inches thick. The weight of the walls has kept the boards in place. Carpeting first put down around 1820 had helped to save the original floor.