Treasures of Biloxi: Art Conservation in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

But Winterthur conservators discovered a secret in the painting. When the painting was X-rayed by Kerr-Allison and Richard Wolbers, WUDPAC’s coordinator of science instruction, they found that its original background, which showed the image of a building, had been painted over. Kerr-Allison speculated that the building was Beauvoir, painted over with foliage. Maybe there was a reason Beauvoir disappeared from the portrait: in 1888 Winnie became engaged to the Yankee Alfred Wilkinson, a New York attorney, causing outrage among Southerners. Eventually she called off the engagement and in fact never married, but Kerr-Allison theorized that a possible reason for the overpainting was that someone who felt betrayed by Winnie’s romance with a Yankee “erased” Beauvoir from her portrait.

When the portrait of Winnie arrived at Winterthur, it was clear that the damage might have been far worse, and the New Orleans Conservation Guild’s wax lining had protected it from complete destruction. As it was, however, the damage was severe. Kerr-Allison first cleaned the painting to remove the debris and salt, which can cause the paint layers to deteriorate. She then removed the wax lining to flatten and stabilize the canvas at the point of the tear and removed the previous restoration materials. The painting was humidified to reduce distortions in the canvas. The large tear was patched from the back using fabric and adhesive, and a new lining was attached to the entire reverse of the canvas to stabilize it. Conservation is slow, however, and conservators will need several more months before restoration is complete. Following the basic principle of employing only removable substances, the conservators will apply a clear synthetic resin before restoring paint that was rubbed away in the storm, and they will then apply a removable synthetic varnish to protect the painting and restoration.

Jefferson Davis

George Bagby Matthews completed the portrait of Jefferson Davis in 1888, when Davis was 80 years old. The damage this painting sustained from the hurricane was not as great as that of Winnie. However, it arrived at Winterthur with a warped canvas and severe salt water damage that resulted in blanching (tiny whitish cracks on the surface of the varnish that potentially allow salt water to penetrate into the paint layer beneath).

As with Winnie, the New Orleans Conservation Guild had restored the portrait of Jefferson Davis in the year before Katrina, but the Davis portrait restoration was limited to removal of the original varnish and application of Dammar varnish made from a natural plant resin. During Katrina, the canvas had been under water for around eight hours, swelling with moisture and shrinking again as it dried, which caused extensive warping and paint loss. At Winterthur damage to the varnish was apparent, but the conservators wanted to assess the damage to the paint underneath the varnish, as well as to the canvas itself.

The conservators' first task was to remove the dammar varnish applied by the New Orleans Conservation Guild. Several solvents were tested, and finally a solution of equal parts of acetone, petroleum benzene, and isopropanol was successful in removing it. It turned out that the blanching was limited to the varnish, and the paint underneath the varnish was revealed to be unharmed by the salt water. However, because of the warping of the canvas, the portrait did suffer flaking and loss of paint.

To correct the warping of the canvas, conservation student Kristen de Ghetaldi placed small tabs along the perimeter of the canvas and pulled them slightly every day for several days to eventually achieve an overall evenness of the canvas. The painting was also kept for six hours in a humidification chamber before the inpainting (painting in the areas where there had been paint loss) could begin. Davis's portrait is now fully conserved and restored.

La Bella

Purchased in Europe and brought to Mississippi by Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, in 1870, La Bella possibly reminded Mrs. Davis of her young daughter Winnie. But the history of the painting's origin is unclear. It depicts a woman wearing a 16th-century gown and an angelic smile. She carries an air of mystery, looking out with eyes both knowing and innocent—and for the WUDPAC conservators the portrait was indeed mysterious. At first glance it appears to be a slightly larger version of the original La Bella, painted in the 16th-century studio of Palma Vecchio that presently hangs in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. But for the conservators it was not clear whether the one from Beauvoir was made in the same 16th-century studio or was copied later. To properly conserve the painting, a primary part of their work was to determine the date of La Bella's creation.

Since painters' pigments have changed over the years, a common method of dating paintings uses chemical analysis to identify the elements in the pigments. Matching up the elements used in the painting with those known to have been used during certain periods in art history will provide clues to the date of origin. The conservators used ultraviolet scans of La Bella to identify the areas that were left untouched by previous restoration; this is possible because restored areas appear dark under an ultraviolet light. They then subjected 20-µm segments of the unrestored areas of the painting to X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy to identify the chemical makeup of the pigments. XRF spectroscopy is a nondestructive technique that allows researchers to identify the elements in a particular pigment by the characteristic secondary X-rays emitted from a sample. As X-rays bombard an object, inner-shell electrons are ejected from atoms. Outer-shell electrons then fill the vacancies that are left in the inner shell and emit their excess energy as secondary X-rays. The characteristic peaks of the fluorescent X-rays identify the elements present; the peaks' height indicates the elements' relative quantities.

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