The Huntington

For Church, the frame was a window that led the viewer deeper into a painting.

Church certainly hadn’t intended Chimborazo to be viewed in a frame that was too bright, too yellow. Amy Meyers, The Huntington’s curator of American art when Chimborazo arrived in 1989, determined a new frame was in order. In 1998 she asked the esteemed Eli Wilner & Co. in New York City to design and craft a frame that might match Church’s own conception of the proper border. Meyers brainstormed with Eli Wilner & Company, gallery director at Wilner, about how Church might have intended to frame the painting, based on his other frame designs. A lucky break for the project came a year later when William Osborn’s great-grandson Frederick discovered some old family photos and sent them to Meyers. There was the painting in an intricately ornate, gilded frame, on display in two different homes at different points in its 100-year stay with the family.

If this was the original frame, when had it been removed, and where had it gone? In the 1970s the high cost of insuring Chimborazo had prompted the Osborn family to arrange its long-term loan to an East Coast museum. Had a curator there separated it from its frame? Had someone in the family? Meyers implored the family to look in the attic or barn on their property, but no frame turned up. Meyers then showed the photographs to Smeaton. “I immediately recognized the frame style as a specific design,” Smeaton says. “It was nearly identical to one on another Church painting. I knew with certainty it had been designed by Frederic Church himself.”

The Church painting that Smeaton remembered was The Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica (1867), at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn. Church had verifiably designed its frame. The primary bands of ornament in both frames were identical. Eli Wilner & Co. had previously worked with the Atheneum, and it drew on this relationship when it struck a deal with the curator: Eli Wilner staff would conduct minor restoration on the frame of The Vale of St. Thomas, and the Atheneum would allow them to use that frame as a prototype, even to dismantle it to study its construction. With this model and the photographs, a reproduction of the Church-designed frame was possible, and Chimborazo would once again be displayed in the manner intended by the artist. Why someone had removed the original frame remains a mystery, but the answer may lie in the fact that 19th-century American frames fell victim to the shifting tastes of the art world in the early 20th century. With modernism and minimalism, a taste for simplicity reigned. “A frame as ornate as Chimborazo’s may have looked dated, heavy, and old-fashioned,” says Smith. Indeed, American frames of the mid- to late 19th century became so passé to gallery owners and curators that they routinely took them off and stacked them in basements or sent them to junk stores. In some cases crafty scavengers salvaged the frames for their gold content, and in the process destroyed them forever. Museums don’t necessarily treat frames as accessioned objects-separate from the artwork that is a documented part of the collection-so their whereabouts aren’t always tracked. Galleries often reframe works of art, depending on the styles and needs dictated by the market and their clients. Private collectors, of course, always have used reframing as a way to personalize their artwork as well as to display their decorating tastes.

But the tides turned by the 1980s, with a revival of interest in 19th-century American art. “In the last 10 years in particular, people have really started to see frames as historical objects,” says Smeaton. “Museums, curators, collectors, and dealers now give great thought and attention to the historical appropriateness of frame styles.” As evidence, Eli Wilner’s Long Island City workshop is in a perpetual swirl of activity as growing numbers of museums and galleries reunite American paintings with appropriate period frames. It was here that as many as 11 craftspeople worked on the new Chimborazo frame, spending more than 300 hours regenerating Church’s original vision. Put on hold in 2001 when Meyers left The Huntington, the reframing project finally reached completion under the watch of Smith, who put the job on the fast track when The Huntington signed on as a venue for the exhibition “Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church.” The project was also made possible through a gift from actor Steve Martin, who gave The Huntington $1 million to support its American art collection and exhibitions.

Chimborazo’s new frame was shipped from New York on a truck and arrived at The Huntington in early August 2006. A few weeks later the switch was made. Smith stood in the Scott Gallery and nervously watched as Exhibits Manager Gregg Bayne and a crew gingerly removed Chimborazo from its old frame and set it into the new. The first sigh of relief came when the painting actually fit; with construction having taken place across the country, the potential for a miscalculation was real. Bayne and his crew secured Chimborazo in its frame, and breaths were held again as the crew heaved the heavy canvas onto its wall hooks.

The impact of the new frame on the painting was immediate and dramatic, and it was readily apparent to those in the room how the old frame never possessed the proper muscle to support such a monumental canvas. The layers of ornamentation have great drama and texture, and yet the detail doesn’t overwhelm the painting, but rather enhances it, says Smith. The frame’s stepped cove leads the eye into the spatial depth of the painting, and the warm tones of the gilding accentuate the luminous golden tones of the mountains that occupy its center. Church’s cumulus clouds, overshadowed by the bright gold of the other frame, pop out around the landscape’s edges. “The result is glorious,” says Smith. Traude Gomez-Rhine is a staff writer at The Huntington.

What’s in a Frame?

Eli Wilner & Co. employed some of the same processes that have been used for centuries in frame construction:

Wooden Substrate, or Basic Form
First, craftsmen milled the wood pieces that form the “bones” of the frame. They then fitted these wood sections together into the frame’s skeletal form.

Molded Design Motifs and Elements
Most 19th-century American frames consist of wooden substrates embellished with applied ornaments that were made from a material called composition, or compo-a moldable mixture of chalk, resins, linseed oil, and glue, which dried hard and could be used in place of the labor-intensive process of hand carving. Today, however, Eli Wilner & Co. uses its own proprietary material (similar to plaster) in place of compo. Artisans cast the design elements of the Chimborazo frame directly from the Vale of St. Thomas frame, using molds made from silicon rubber. They then affixed these new ornaments to the wood frame, intricately fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Gilding and Finishing
Craftsmen then applied a thin liquid plaster called gesso, essentially chalk mixed with glue and water. Six to eight coats are generally required to build up a 16th-inch of gesso. The sanded gesso surface is then painted with bole, liquid clay that provides another layer of porosity as well as the color that will shine through the gold leaf. Bole on 19th-century American frames was usually blue-gray in color, although red, yellow, brown, and white have also been used in different eras. Indeed, Smeaton explains that red bole in the previous Chimborazo frame indicated a modern reproduction and rendered the frame too bright.

Craftsmen affixed 23-karat gold leaf with a mixture called gilder’s liquor-alcohol, water, and glue. They then polished selected areas of the frame with a tool called a burnisher, usually made with an agate stone, to create reflective highlights and contrast with the matte areas. Finally, craftsmen applied a patina to make the frame look old and authentic. “This is the most challenging of the gilder’s craft,” says Smeaton. The artisans all have their recipes-combinations of dyes, tints, and paints. “It’s important that the frame look like it has always been on the painting.”

Treasure from The Huntington
“Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church” will be on view in the Huntington’s Boone Gallery until Jan. 3, 2007. It features 18 works from Olana, the home of Church in Hudson, N.Y., which became a National Historic Landmark in 1970. This exhibition marks the first time that these works have traveled as a group. The Huntington supplements this traveling exhibition with an object-in-focus display of Chimborazo. This section also features 19th-century objects from the Library collections not usually on public display, including editions of Alexander von Humboldt’s books. Object labels will also link the plants depicted in Chimborazo to specimens in The Huntington’s Botanical Gardens.