BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON HISTORIC CHURCHES 31st ANNUAL EDITION 7 highly prized and found its way into several American museums. Such was his reputation that many other pieces not by Gibbons but given his name were also sold at a premium. In recent years these museums have been reassessing their collections and their attributions with interesting results. Likewise, the fire in the King’s Apartments at Hampton Court Palace in 1986 was a catalyst to more detailed reappraisal of the carvings there under the eyes of David Luard and the late David Esterley as repairs were being undertaken, revealing surface treatments under layers of Victorian varnish. David Esterley’s book, Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving, which was recently republished, is now a standard text on the subject. For pure aesthetic impact, the restoration of the reredos in St James’s, Piccadilly in 2005 startled the conservation world when David Luard applied a coat of gouache over what had previously been very dark, heavily varnished carvings which had lost all definition. It was a strategy that proved controversial at the time but was based on documents and analysis which suggested that the original carvings darkened over time with the smoke of fires, dust, dirt and candlewax, and needed ‘freshening up’. Gibbons himself was paid periodically to clean and repair the carvings at Windsor Castle, but limewood is difficult to clean. It appears that sometimes a coat of limewash or other substance such as oil paint was applied to brighten the carvings and restore something of their original appearance, and this was the approach taken at St James’s, with spectacular results. Different institutions and museums have been working quietly since on their own collections. At Kensington Palace three important compositions of Gibbons have survived – in the King’s Presence Chamber and Queen Anne’s Orangery, with two further gilded mirrored overmantles in the Queen’s Gallery. All have now been reassessed. In 2013 the Presence Chamber carvings were removed for conservation and found to preserve extensive traces of white oil paint – together with fragments of the wire wool which had been used to strip them in 1898 and left behind by lazy restorers. William Kent is known to have painted panelling and carvings in 1725 just four years after the death of the carver as part of his decorative alterations to the King’s and Queen’s Apartments. However the Victorians scraped what they dismissively called ‘Kent’s dirty incrustations’ back to what was believed to be their original appearance, revealing in the meantime some crafty replacements in pine by the notorious ‘restorer’ William Gibbs Rogers. Was the paint original? In this case we couldn’t tell, but a similar appraisal of the many carvings at Hampton Court Palace suggested that some paint had been applied at a later date, and this is a similar story emerging in houses such as Petworth and several churches, including St Paul’s Cathedral, St Mary Abchurch in the City of London and elsewhere. Conservation and repair of the chapel at Trinity College, Oxford, by Alan Lamb revealed the use of Bermudan cedar, now a rare and unobtainable wood, but probably highly exotic in its time and selected for its colour. When Celia Fiennes visited the chapel in 1695, she described the carving as ‘sweet like Cedar and of a reddish coullr, but ye grain much fine and well vein’d’. Cleaning trials indeed revealed a reddish natural hue on the underlying veneers. Attempts had also been made to lighten the carvings, as a layer of varnish was applied to the dirty bare wood before a lead-based paint, tinted with red and yellow iron oxides and red lake had then been applied in an attempt to restore the original light contrast. Similar attempts had been made at St Mary Abchurch. There, an old guidebook cites an account in the church archives which record their repainting in the natural colours Carvings at Trinity College after the reinstatement of the original appearance of the carvings, set against a contrasting veneered background. (Photo: Alan Lamb)
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