Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
my name is chris young, and I am a paper conservator
and in the instances of The Hermitage, my focus is primarily on the wallpaper
although i do any sort of paper
uh... i've been in the field
since seventy eight
thirty five years at this point
making me an old lady in the profession
and my experience has been really broad , i have moved all over the country
been in nashville for about twenty five years now
has been working out these painters since
nineteen seventy eight, I began with the downstairs Telemachus papers
we did a major restoration of the mansion back in the early nineties
which at that time i spent about a year-and-a-half out here
working all the various bedrooms
and now during the one week in January each year
The Hermitage is closed to the public
i come in and i will focus on a single room at the time
and try to do maintenance so that we can prevent having to do another
year-and-a-half project out here
documentation showed that there are three sets of Telemachus wallpaper
that
two sets of downstairs the third set
is believed to be upstairs but there was never any photographs of it
disappeared very very early in the history of the
the house
this particular Telemachus paper
came as part of the restoration in the nineties
and it was actually acquired from a house in
France
this paper was installed in that house prior to
installation of the papers downstairs here
the papers were taking down from the house in france
brought to the states
i washed it
I mended it, i lined it
and then it was installed
there are two places in the room
where paper had been trimmed away
in the original installation
to accommodate doorways and that sort of thing
and so in the paper was installed here we discovered that there were two major
gaps in the paper
those areas were filled
we've made a very conscious decision
to use a paint that would have different gleam or a different shine
than the original paper
and also instead of the hand made paper that the original
is made of
which puts horizontal seams ever twenty six inches
the papers that i used for those inserts
are continuous sheet paper so they have a very different look
if you consciously
study them
but on first glance you're not going to notice they are anything different than the rest of the paper