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It is well established that iron gall ink causes deterioration and embrittlement of paper in the presence of one or more risk factors, such as unstable ink components, high humidity and unsafe handling, with the ink changing colour from black to shades of brown. As iron gall ink has been the prevailing drawing medium in the West from medieval times to the eighteenth century, with its use declining into the twentieth century, monitoring the condition of iron gall ink drawings is of great concern to all custodians of graphic art collections. Selected iron gall ink drawings have been examined using visual methods in the British Museum Prints and Drawing collection to identify, assess and describe condition issues specific to the medium. This has led to the production of a reference catalogue of damage, which has underpinned this draft-design for a condition survey tool. This survey has then been developed with input from conservators at the Albertina, Vienna, Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museum zu Berlin, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, based on the material from their collections. This article presents the pilot project used to test the survey alongside its initial validation and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe trial production and evaluation of model papers deliberately discoloured in a controlled and reproducible manner during manufacture using modern water-soluble synthetic and natural dyes. The intention was to produce papers in the quantities required to serve as material for research, familiarisation and training in conservation. In the initial evaluation it was possible to demonstrate disparate responses to water by thin, low-grammage, and thick, high-grammage papers and by hydrophilic and hydrophobic papers which in real objects present very different sets of risks and require different methods to mitigate the risks. The evaluation has shown potential of model papers with consistent structure, properties and staining in teaching and experimentation which exceeded the authors' original expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Maria Bohusz (1950–1996), a Polish paper conservator and teacher of conservation, who lived and worked in Paris for the Central Laboratory of the Service de Restauration des Musées de France, based at Versailles. She was an inspiration to me in the pursuit of the study of pastels, and, more importantly, she was a friend. Summary This paper looks at the emergence and development of pastel as a recognized artists' technique in its own right in the second part of the Eighteenth Century. The novelty of these pastels was their softness, which offered artists a swifter and more economical medium to obtain the painterly effects previously limited to oil painting. New extenders and binding media were employed in pastel production, and the growing demand for high-quality soft sticks was undoubtedly responsible for the broad range of artists' materials which was soon advocated in contemporary painting manuals. The trade in pastels responded quickly to the demands of artists who were competing to satisfy the popular demand for private portraiture. The particular predilection for pastel at this period is only explained by the favourable aesthetic context of rococo painting. The colours which were popular in textiles, interior decoration, and art were bright and lively, and white and ‘pastel’ hues were particularly fashionable. The finish then in vogue was matt and opaque, and the texture of pastels was ideal to depict the notorious eighteenth-century cosmetic make-up. In its heyday, the status of pastel paintings seems to have matched that of oils, and one finds that oils strove to achieve effects which were natural to pastels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper is an empirical assessment of two methods of inlaying drawings, with the aim of assisting conservators in the selection of mounting methods for the collection of drawings at The British Museum. The first method tested was the traditional bevelled inlay and the second the more recently adopted ‘strip’ method. A set of samples inlaid using each of the two methods were subjected to changing levels of relative humidity and observed for (i) overall cockling; (ii) curvature; and (iii) bulging distortion along the join between the inlay and the drawing. The results of the tests seem to indicate that the strip method is preferable to the traditional method, particularly in the case of thinner drawing papers. The overall extent of cockling on all samples seemed to depend on the hygroexpansive properties of the papers and the adhesive selected for the join. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]