The Hidden Secret behind George Washington's Portrait!

Hey everybody, Adam Savage and I am in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery Conservation Lab with Madigan Framing Specialist Eric. How are you, sir? Terrific. Really good to see you. Yeah. Good to see you. Tell me what we're looking at here. So, yeah, this is another object that we'll be putting on display this summer for our Refresh of America's Presidents to coincide with the 250th celebrations. So this is something that came to us in a historic frame. Oh, I was looking at the back. Okay. Yeah. And it has been somewhat recently reconfigured to better protect the artwork, but not very well done. And this is a pastel. Yeah. Essentially a crayon. And if I'm remembering correctly, this artist's specialty was like immediate pastels? Yeah, yeah. Like this was drawn in situ? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So there's a moment Washington's sitting here and he is whipping this out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really cool. Yeah. It's pretty fun. As of yesterday, talking about revising our plan for this. Oh, okay. Partly in lieu of our conversation with you in preparation for this, you mentioned, did we date the newspaper on the back? Right. And I thought, let's take a closer look at it. So there's this inscription, which we'd always intended to preserve. Right. Which in itself is kind of funny. It's quite beautiful. I can't make it all out. It is an original portrait of George Washington taken in 19... I thought 19 too, but it's 17. 17. It was painted by Mr. I can't quite read that. In the something likeness? Yeah. That's what I get. Yeah. And then I have a hard time through this section. Completion or competition? Complexion? I don't... Yeah. Something blah, blah, blah. But then down here, it talks about his teeth. Oh. Which is kind of funny because he had fake teeth dentures, apocryphally wooden, which I think is not... Not true. ...actually true. Ivory, I believe. Ivory was one. Yeah. I think he actually swapped them out a few times. Anyway, it talks about how they did not disfigure his mouth. Ah, so they were expecting them to. Yeah. The mythology of his teeth is a part of his history. Yeah. And how they changed his face and how they were wood, which is not true. Yeah. So maybe he was expecting a more difficult portrait. Yeah. Well, so yeah. So that's it. But then after our conversation with you, I started looking at more of it. There's a lot of... It's just sort of ephemera. There's some ads for apartments to rent in Boston, whatever this... I haven't found a date yet. Wow. But this section here from a newspaper... Yeah. ...actually refers to this artwork. What? Yeah. It's very strange. It's easier to read the block off. But in this paragraph... Oh, look at that. The last original, in parenthesis, Profiling Crayons, I think... Yeah. ...was by... It was by Sharples. Well, so Sharpless here from Autocorrect got them, I think, 1796. So it's definitely newspaper columns, right? Because I see the lines there. Yeah. And other ads from newspaper, but in different orientations. And in different typefaces, too. So these could be multiple newspapers. Yeah. Our original plan, you can see the frame size is almost exactly the size of the art support. And we need to find a way to put it behind glazing material, but give separation enough between the surface of the artwork and the glazing material that they don't come into contact with each other. You don't want them touching, because... Don't want them touching. So originally, we were going to route out this frame a little bit so that we could... Give it a little more breathing space. Put some spacers, replace this old glass, which is kind of attractive. You can see the lines. Oh, yeah. And stuff. Oh, those are lines from its manufacturer. Yeah. Wow. That's cool. I was just going to cut away a 316th of an inch all the way around, or something like that, in order to make space for all of this other stuff, and the sealed packages we do. But now we got to... I don't necessarily want to destroy that newspaper now, even though I thought it was just ephemera, which oftentimes it is, but it seems impossible to be coincidentally an article about this piece. Right. Like someone made the effort to put that there and make that part of it. Yeah. Well, so despite the fact that you're still figuring out what to do with the newspaper, tell me about the sealed packages. Oh, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. Tell me about the preservation. So I have a little didactic thing. So most of the things we put, works on paper at least, that we put up in the museum, partly because we are in a historic building and we can't control the humidity, temperature, as well as we would really like. Gotcha. We put works in paper into a package, glazing material, whatever kind of matting arrangement needs to be done, and then we use some sort of backing material. This is marble seal. So this is a system by which you are able to seal it from the outside world, protect it from the things that are encasing it so that it is floating, but no outside influences causing more deterioration. Yeah. And this is a very good vapor barrier, so fluctuations in relative humidity within the museum won't penetrate through to the artwork inside. So how will a sealed container get made for this pastel? So in this case, we're probably going to remove it from that sort of cream colored background. Oh wow. That's not part of the artwork. Okay. That was somebody's framing approach, and attach it to a piece of, I think black board, and then black spacers that will be set, if we open the frame up, set away from the artwork enough that nothing is in contact with the surface of the artwork, and those spacers will hold the glazing away, and then seal that whole thing. When you're peeling that off of its backing, do you know how it was stuck down? How does that process go? That sounds absolutely terrifying to me. Yeah, so this one shouldn't be too terrifying, because it's a relatively modern connection between that artwork and that cream colored board. What does that mean, a modern connection? Somebody, framer, conservator, attached it to that board using Japanese paper hinges. Hopefully Japanese paper hinges. So we should be able to slide the scalpel under there, and just free those hinges, and then release the artwork. Now if there's also, you gotta do that a little bit gently, and sort of poke around in there a little bit, because there may also be some other kind of adhesive, or some other thing, you know, it's an old object. And it feels like, you know, seeing all the different portraits of Washington, he's so embedded in our cultural consciousness, and yet, when you see the subtle differences between all of the Washington faces in this building, it sort of fills out a man. Yeah, and especially somebody who didn't like his image, you know, like even this thing, the beginning of it, so the other interesting thing about this little article is it talks about the Lansdowne portrait, but about how much he disliked sitting for his portraits, and Stuart came up with this ploy to get him to talk about horses, and that lifted his mood enough to, like, get a picture of him that wasn't, yeah, just dour and grumpy. So if you got him talking about horses, apparently you could get a little bit of a smile. That is really cool. Okay, so what is the very next step for you to determine, to figure out the trajectory for this package? One option is just fabricate a new frame in a historical style. And then separately, maybe work on conserving and figuring this out. And then just store it, yeah, store it, and yeah, deal with it in some... I think the other option we might pursue is just to lift this entirely off and preserve it along with that. And you have a set of all sorts of different techniques for achieving those kinds of separations. But it's fairly delaminated already, so it gets stuck about here, I'm hardly pushing on this, but you can feel around in there and see that I think it won't be too hard to get off and keep it intact. And I'm assuming this is part of the framing, but you're not necessarily going to put that back, am I right? No, I'm not going to put it back. This is some sort of batting material, I guess, probably to squish it into the glass more, Right, to give it a little more, yeah. Do you keep that stuff? I think we're going to keep this. We're not going to reuse it or incorporate it into the frame, it's kind of nasty. Now it strikes me that you brought out this example of the sealed package, and I don't think we covered all of the structural stuff that this is actually demonstrating now that I'm looking at this. Yeah. Can you walk me through? Yeah, so this demonstrates a few different things at once, but as far as the sealed packages, the other thing I don't think I mentioned before this cutout is just to show this material called Artsorb. It's a silica impregnated paper sheet material. So it can be buffered to like 50% relative humidity. So then it absorbs. And once you enclose it in there, it'll keep that environment at 50% relative humidity for some length of time, a year-ish or something like that before it needs to be replaced or reconditioned. Wow, okay. So that gets incorporated in the sealed package as well. Some sort of backing material, then the marble seal or some other vapor barrier. This side just demonstrates one technique for housing and securing artwork within a Oh, okay, right. Linen tape just past the mat line. Yeah. So there's a little bit of paper here, a corner made out of paper held in place by this linen tape. So you're constantly dealing with multiple modalities of different ideas about how to mount artwork. Yeah. Because it's been changing over the last few hundred years. It's been changing. And even if it weren't changing, especially with older artworks, they all have different needs. Right, right. And have different histories and been through different environments and whatever. So there are a handful of rules that are good to follow, but often you can't follow them because the object doesn't accommodate that. Then you just have to figure out the path. Yeah, you have to figure it out and consult with conservators, figure out. And also designers and stuff, because it does sometimes affect the aesthetic presentation of the work. You know, there's certain things you want to do to preserve it, but they make it look funny. Yeah. And curators don't like that. So, you know, there's some amount of compromise and a lot of discussion behind those decisions. It's such an amalgam of amazing pieces of history. The frame, the article, the writing, this, it's an amazing set of objects to work with under the guise of a single object. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Eric, thank you so much. Yeah, of course. I really appreciate this tour. Of course. It's such an amazing portrait. Dude, the National Portrait Gallery was even cooler than that video because we shot a whole bunch more videos. There's a playlist right there.