The
following series of photographs partially document the transformation
of a pair of ancestral portraits from the American South. The
original pre-Civil war frames carry the labels of a New Orleans
art supplier, and one of the frames had been recently smashed
by a moving company. According to family tradition the paintings
had been "slashed by Yankee bayonets during the Civil War", and
one eye of the woman had been painted over a former restorer's
patch. The paintings were cleaned, lined in a vacuum press to
flatten the cracks, and a new eye was perfectly re-painted by
Deborah Kravitz. The broken frame fragments were re-joined, the
missing gesso elements re-cast, fit and the gold matched to the
original surface.
Courtesy Private Collection
