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 SMP Silver Salon Forums
 A Curator's Viewpoint
 Exhibitions - cleaning & polishing
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| Author | Topic: Exhibitions - cleaning & polishing |
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Scott Martin Forum Master Posts: 11520 |
posted 05-04-1999 10:42 AM
  
We attend exhibitions of silver collections whenever we can. The institutions hosting these exhibitions have some of the most interesting and wonderful items to see. Although it is great to get an up close look, most often the silver is so very very polished and cleaned it can be a frustrating experience. The silver having been so very polished/cleaned results in the shadowing and detail of the chasing, repousse, bright cutting, engine turning, engraving, etc. being lost to the naked eye. Often when you compare a turn of the century photograph of the same item(s) at exhibition, the 100 year old photo looks better because shadowing and detail is present. Why do institutions today polish and preserve their wonderful silver gifts like this? Scott & June Martin IP: Logged |
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Ulysses Dietz Moderator Posts: 1265 |
posted 05-04-1999 10:21 PM
Remember, most silver was originally intended to be eye-dazzling--with the exception of things given a "French grey" finish at the turn of the century, which would have been a softer, less mirror-like luster. However, old photographs of silver in exhibitions usually show silver that was somehow treated with a surface duller in order to eliminate difficult reflections created by camera lighting. Up until the past decade, most silver photography (of which I have witnessed a great deal)took a huge amount of time to eliminate all of the sparkle by virtually encasing a silver piece in a tent of white. Auction houses used to (still do, to a degree) spray a mat finish onto silver when they photographed it for catalogues. So, when you look at an old black and white of silver, you're looking at an artificially created non-reflective surface. This, of course, doesn't deal with the reality that silver has been polished over its lifetime in human hands, and detail has sometimes been softened--and only when it comes to a museum does that cease, sort of. A museum tries to restrict the amount of cleaning that silver undergoes, and nowadays uses only calcium carbonate powder (chalk) and distilled water to clean it. But, we still want the stuff to sparkle the way it would have been intended to in a domestic setting. Honestly, I'd never thought about the problem that the sparkle creates for people trying to focus on details. Most of the public who come to a museum aren't thinking of that--which is frustrating for curators. Hmmm--I wonder if there's some way to lessen the surface shine of silver to make engraved and chased details more visible? IP: Logged |
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