Student Blog: Philadelphia Museum of Art

Hello from Philadelphia! This year I am very pleased to join the incredible team in the furniture and woodwork conservation lab at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) as a third-year graduate intern. Although our activities and access to the museum are limited due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I am glad to be able to spend several days every week working in-person in the lab under strict safety protocols, which include social distancing, staggered scheduling and universal mask use. 

My current project involves the treatment of an unusual chest of drawers that was made in Philadelphia nearly three hundred years ago. This piece of furniture is made from cherry wood on the outside, with yellow pine and white cedar used for the interior parts of the case and drawers. It is unusual because it consists of three separate chests of three drawers each stacked on one another to form a tall chest nine drawers high. While double chests consisting of two stacked chests of drawers are common, triple chests like this one are almost unheard of. Rare or unique furniture forms often raise a red flag regarding a piece's authenticity, but in this case the triple chest's history and provenance are well documented. Its original owner was Elizabeth Coates Paschall (1701/2-1768), a wealthy Quaker dry goods merchant as well as a practitioner of homeopathy and botanical sciences whose recipe book is held by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The chest descended in her family until it was given to the museum in the 1920s. The Paschall family summer home, Cedar Grove, was also donated to the City of Philadelphia, and today it is administered by the PMA as a historic house museum containing a remarkable collection of the Paschall family's original belongings, including this triple chest. 

The chest is currently in the conservation lab following a roof leak at Cedar Grove which damaged its finish on one side. In addition to documenting its construction and researching its relationship to other eighteenth-century furniture from Philadelphia, I am treating the chest's finish damage under the guidance of Senior Conservator of Furniture and Woodwork Behrooz Salimnejad and Associate Conservator of Furniture Peggy Olley (WUDPAC 2005). The treatment has involved cleaning the surface to remove plaster residue deposited during the leak, testing solvents to determine the finish's solubility, re-forming blanched varnish through solvent application, and re-saturating the damaged finish using an easily removable synthetic varnish. The final step will involve toning damaged areas with easily reversible conservation colors in order to integrate the damage with the rest of the surface.

One reason that the PMA's furniture and woodwork conservation lab is a wonderful place to work is that in addition to the museum's significant collection of historic Philadelphia furniture, the lab treats and studies objects from all of the museum's curatorial departments, including European, Asian, modern, and contemporary art. I recently had the opportunity to perform a small treatment on the museum's Japanese tea house, and among the objects currently in the lab are architectural fragments from an English gothic church, a chrome-plated stool designed by Marcel Breuer, a seventeenth-century English cabinet decorated in imitation of Asian lacquer, an eighteenth-century inlaid miniature chest from nearby Chester County, and a twentieth-century surrealist sculptural sofa. During this difficult time, I feel fortunate to be surrounded by a great diversity of fascinating objects and to learn from inspiring colleagues and mentors.        

— Jonathan Stevens, WUDPAC class of 2021