Art conservation and a view into history

​Traveling salespeople were once a familiar sight in cities, towns, and the countryside as they went door to door showing their wares. These ranged from kitchenware to Persian rugs to furniture to gravestones, all miniaturized so they could fit inside a suitcase-sized portable box, or kit. One of the more innovative kits was carried in the 1930s by salespeople for Wadsworth Howland and Co., a Boston-based firm that sold artists’ supplies and drafting stationary for architects. This kit, known as a Colorguide, promoted Bay State paints.

​It contains five rollers that advance color swatches over diagrams of different rooms, allowing homeowners to view the rooms through a glass window and envision how the paints might look throughout the house. Only two such Colorguides are known to exist, both once owned by the same collectors. The first was donated in 1998 to the Athenaeum in Philadelphia and the second was gifted in 2019 to the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library for its library collection. This year WUDPAC second-year Fellow Elle Friedberg, an objects major with a preventive minor, began treating Winterthur’s Colorguide so that it can be preserved and used safely for teaching and research.​

​Elle found the Colorguide to be in relatively good condition overall, with the mechanical components remaining fully functional. However, a musty odor inside attested to the effects of incorrect relative humidity, as did the corrosion of two metal pieces within the kit, which in turn damaged a green textile on the lid that rests against the metal. Additionally, the interior and exterior of the Colorguide had accumulated a substantial amount of dust and grime.

​Elle was able to clean the many small moving parts inside the box using small brushes and a vacuum equipped with microtool attachments. She found a cut-down plastic pipette especially helpful for accessing hard-to-reach areas. She treated the metal by applying solvent with a swab to loosen corrosion and then worked carefully with a scalpel under magnification to reduce it further. She next applied a very thin layer of wax onto the metal to protect it from moisture and covered the damaged green textile with thin strips of a toned synthetic textile for further protection, as well as aesthetic integration.

Before returning the Colorguide to the library, Elle created a custom housing that will help protect it from light, humidity, dust, and insects in storage.​

​A printable PDF version of this story is available at this link​​. Previous stories on projects from the Department of Art Conservation are archived on our website​.​​​​​​​​​