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Thursday June 16th 2016
Although it was not illegal in the 19th century—as it is in most
cases today—to import elephant ivory, the material was rare, exotic to
early Americans, and highly valued. So when Winterthur/University of
Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) Fellow Jessica Chasen
began treating six ivory-handled knives and forks from the Winterthur
Museum’s collection, she thought it likely that the cutlery once
belonged to a well-to-do family who deliberately chose ivory rather than
the horn- or bone-handled sets also available at the time. Jessica
believes the three knives and three forks, which have steel blades and
tines and appear to come from a matched set, date from the mid-19th
century. They were made by a firm called Horton & Co. in Sheffield,
England, and were once displayed in the museum’s Pine Kitchen, a
historical room that was deinstalled and transformed into the Kirshner
complex.
The steel components of the knives and forks had developed uneven
patches of corrosion. Through x-radiography, Jessica discovered that the
ivory had been drilled well below the tang, the hidden piece of steel
anchored in the handle, so that a lead counterweight could be placed
inside the tip of each handle. While this may have made the utensils
more comfortable for users, the Art-conservation-and-the-markings-of-timecombination of the thinned ivory,
corroding steel, and additional lead helped produce cracks running down
the length of each handle.
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Jessica cleaned the surfaces with soft bristle brushes and a HEPA
vacuum, and then gently rubbed the blades and tines with soft abrasive
papers and a slow-evaporating solvent to reduce the corrosion. She then
cleaned the ivory handles using the novel solution of a water-containing
gel based on the work of Professor Richard Wolbers. To ensure that
water did not reach the interior of the handle and cause more corrosion
of the steel, she first applied cyclododecane as a temporary barrier
around the top rim of each handle and within the cracks. After cleaning,
she filled each crack with a pigmented wax so that the cracks would no
longer be obtrusive and matched the surrounding ivory surface. Each
knife and fork had been marked with an accession number when first
acquired by Winterthur, but these numbers were in highly visible spots
on the ivory and had led to staining. Jessica delicately used the tip of
a fine scalpel to remove most of the paint, then applied solvent gels
to remove the deep stains, before re-applying new numbers to the metal
using a more conservation-conscious material.
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With the treatment now complete, the ivory-handled knives and forks will
become excellent examples in the study collection, being used to
demonstrate how a careful conservation approach can help mitigate the
damage caused by time on fragile materials like ivory. Jessica is
pleased that her treatment will someday mean that these objects will
again be displayed in the Winterthur Museum.
A printable PDF version of this story is available here. Images: Treatment of the ivory handles—Winterthur/University of
Delaware Program in Art Conservation Fellow Jessica Chasen applying
cyclododecane to the cracks in the ivory with a kistka, and a solvent
gel being used to reduce the paint stains on the ivory; three of the
forks, versos before and after treatment and re-numbering; and an
X-radiograph of the cutlery reveals hollow handles with internal tang
and counterweights. (Photos: Jessica Chasen and Julia Commander.)
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It was not illegal in the 19th century to import elephant ivory; the material was exotic to early Americans, and highly valued.
6/16/2016
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