Conserving a French furniture suite - Design Notes

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the fortunate owner of a suite of documented eighteenth-century French furniture with a history of ownership in the Swan family of Massachusetts. These pieces have recently been conserved, reupholstered, and reinstalled in a gallery in the museum (see p.22 of this issue). The suite is comprised of ten pieces, all of which have gilding. Since the pieces came to the museum from a number of private collections, some had been restored while others exhibited various signs of wear. A separate evaluation and recommended treatment was made for each piece. The restoration project was conducted in three stages over the course of four years, all with the generous support of Ellen Jaffe, a member of the board of overseers of the museum.

During the first stage, all ten pieces were shipped to the conservation laboratory at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where they were examined and conserved by Cynthia Moyer, a private conservator under the direction of Brian Considine of the museum. Samples of the gilded surfaces were first analyzed to ascertain how much restoration each piece had undergone. Moyer learned that, while most French furniture of this date was water gilded, on the sections of these pieces with recessed carved leaf decoration, the method used was oil gilding, which was usually reserved for gilding boiserie.

The second phase of the restoration called for reweaving the original upholstery fabric as well as the original borders and passementeries. The museum also owns a lampas curtain of the same fabric as the upholstery (illustrated on p. 22) that descended in the Swan family and was woven in Lyon by Louis Reboul, Foutebrune et Compagnie for the King's Gaming Room at Fontainebleau. The decorative motifs on the Swan curtain include forgers, river-gods, seahorses, and dogs. The French firm of Tassinari et Chatel used this fabric as a guide when reweaving the silk lampas and decorative borders in the original colors of blue, taupe, and cream. To achieve this they were obliged to create about twenty-seven thousand cards for the loom to create a single repeat. Tassinari et Chatel was founded in the late seventeenth century and today has recreated fabrics that once adorned furniture and walls in many of the royal chateaux of France. Declercq Passementiers in Paris reproduced on a handloom (illustrated below) the intrica te silk gimps, braids, and tassels needed for the Swan suite.

The third and final step called fur reupholstering the furniture using noninvasive techniques in order not to damage the fragile wood frames. Remy Brazet of Maison Brazet completed this task, incorporating the discovery that the profile of the seats and backs of the chairs was more rounded than scholars had formerly thought and that the seat cushions were quite high. Research also determined that the outbacks of the chairs were upholstered in white taffeta, not blue satin.

The companies discussed on this page may be contacted by telephone or through their Web sites as listed below

Tassinari et Chatel 33-01-42-33-17-22 (www.lelievre.tm.fr)

Declercq Passementiers 33-01-44-76-90-70

(www.declercqpassementiers.fr)

Maison Brazet 01-47-27-20-89

(www.grandsateliers.com/html/braxetus.html)