Paper Conservation: Decisions & Compromises

een the object of several mounting campaigns,
the first of which occurred in the first half of the
eighteenth century, at the initiative of Antoine
Coypel and of his son Charles, successive keepers
of the royal collection of drawings. They concerned
about 450 drawings, which were at that
time glued on to blue cardboard mounts decorated
with strips of gold paper. Much later, in the
1970s, numerous single study sheets were placed
in beveled window mounts, within which they
are maintained by a hinge on the right side edge.
Today, these drawings are the object of a restoration
campaign that intends to loosen the hinges
that sometimes marked the sheets and to change
the mounts, which have become acidic.
Past treatments tell us about the perception
that our predecessors had of Charles Le Brun’s
cartons. At the time when Garnier d’Isle, Controller
General of the Royal buildings 2 could write
that at least “the heads, the hands and the feet”
should be cut out in order to save them, the importance
accorded to the cartoons was due to the
renown of their author, Le Brun. Their primary
function, to transfer a given composition onto
the wall, was no longer valid; cartoons were not
regarded as true works of art 3 . In the eighteenth
century, one exception, however, is notable:
Pierre-Jean Mariette had a head [cut out of a cartoon]
stuck on to a blue mount 4 , as he did with
the most valuable works in his collection. In the
early nineteenth century, the remounting of cartoons
on canvas marked a change in the works’
perception: it was performed in order to frame
and exhibit them in the galleries of the Louvre.
At this time, any missing parts of the drawing
were completed directly on the coloured margins
(Fig. 3).
The first exhibition of Le Brun’s cartoons
opened in 1866 and lasted for several years. The
effects of light, coupled with the deterioration
from the mix of adhesives used for the pasting,
have caused severe discoloration. These mixtures
of flour-based, protein and carbohydrate adhesives
age badly; they harden and can take on
an orange color. At the time, they were used by
painters as well as by picture restorers. Numerous
small folds and creases show a deformation
of paper and a lack of understanding of paper’s
expansion and contraction phenomena, which
confirms our hypothesis that the remounting
of Le Brun’s cartoons was realized by painters
or picture restorers. In France, the conservation
of graphic works of art is a relatively recent
Fig: 3: Missing areas of the drawings completed in the 19 th
century
discipline; formerly it was associated with the
practice of mounting and framing small- and
medium-sized drawings, while larger formats
were associated with the conservation of largesized
paintings.
Between 1992 and 1994, a campaign was started
to identify and photograph the cartoons by
Charles Le Brun in the collection. Basic restoration
work was done on this occasion, consisting
of surface cleaning of the ensemble and a provisional
consolidation of tears, in order to allow
the works to be photographed safely.
The earliest exhibitions at the Louvre Museum
were pedagogical in nature; their aim was to
allow maximum access to the works. Thereafter,
little by little, the role of the museum was
redefined; it adopted a more scientific approach
to conservation. Today, the museum not only
conserves works of art, it also wishes to affirm
the historical state they were in at the moment
of acquisition.
The works on paper preserved in the Department
of Drawings and Prints of the Louvre are
made accessible to researchers and interested lay
persons in the Department’s study room. Consul-
ICOM-CC Graphic Documents Working Group Interim Meeting | Vienna 17 – 19 April 2013
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