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Thursday June 16th 2016
The work of WUDPAC Fellow Gerritt Albertson was recently
featured in a Philadelphia Inquirer story about the surprising secret
hidden beneath a painting by Susan Macdowell Eakins.
From the online story, entitled "Is an Eakins hiding an Eakins?:
Painting, mystery, detective story," by staff writer John Timpane:
What if one Eakins is hiding another Eakins? The Bibliophile is
a painting by Susan Macdowell Eakins, wife of the celebrated
Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins. An accomplished painter, Susan had
studied with Thomas at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.The Bibliophile is in
the collection at Bryn Mawr College. Now a graduate student in the
Winterthur/University of Delaware program in art conservation has
detected, beneath the surface, a separate painting. . . . Gerrit
Albertson is a graduate student at the Winterthur/University of Delaware
program in art conservation. He’s actually a second-generation
conservator: His mother, Rita Albertson, is the chief conservator at the
Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. As part of the graduate program,
students must study paintings that may have challenges for
conservation. Among three paintings he studied in his second year,
Albertson got The Bibliophile. It came from Marianne Weldon, collections manager for the art and artifact collections at Bryn Mawr College, where The Bibliophile lives. Joyce
Stoner, a professor in the Winterthur/University of Delaware program,
says Weldon also mentioned “there was a legend attached to the painting
that there’s an unfinished painting underneath” associated with
Eakins. Albertson went to work, first doing old-fashioned, look-it-up
research. He found two sources that said the canvas for The Bibliophile was originally Thomas Eakins’.