9mc09-TA-2019_Torino, Museo Civico d'Arte Antica - Palazzo Madama, C. W. Ross, Leslie Ward and her sister, inv. 586

Facilitated description:

 

Leslie Ward and her sister is a small painting on ivory (material obtained from elephant tusks).
Charles William Ross painted the painting in 1810. The painting depicts two girls in white dresses.
The painting is kept at the Civic Museum of Ancient Art in Turin (Palazzo Madama).
The La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Centre restored the painting in 2019.
The restorers dismantled the painting from the frame.They cleaned the painting from dust.
They filled the color gaps with paint.
They put ties between the painting and the frame to protect the painting from rubbing.
Eventually they cleaned the frame and glued the edges and painted the missing gilding parts.

 

 

 

 

Abstract of the intervention:

 

Restoration

Restoration of the miniature Leslie Ward and her sister, 586 began with disassembly from the frame and cleaning with soft brushes and microaspirator. The pictorial retouching was performed with resin-based paint colors in areas affected by abrasions or previous pictorial integrations. On the frame, a cleaning was carried out with brushes and microaspirator, the fracture margins were reinforced with rabbit glue and the chromatic integration of the gilding was carried out. Finally, the internal constraint system was adjusted by inserting teflon panels on the inner perimeter of the golden frame to space the front of the work and prevent abrasions and the back cover cartons were replaced with a single non-acid conservative card (one of the two original cartons was archived as it had the watermark of the paper mill). Four metal ‘flaps’ with a golden finish were then put in place to ensure the stability of the rigid bottom panel.