Paper Conservation: Decisions & Compromises

To Remove or Retain? – Extensive Infills and Reworking in a
Large - Scale Japanese Wall Painting
philip meredith | tanya uyeda
Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
Introduction
Dragon and Clouds, a monumental panoramic wall
painting in ink on paper from an unrecorded
temple in Japan by the 18 th century eccentric
Soga Shohaku, was acquired by the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, from the collector William
Sturgess Bigelow in 1911. Hawk, a companion
work by Shohaku, acquired at the same time, is
believed to come from the same building. Both
works are on identical paper and of the same
proportions. Examination confirmed that Dragon
and Clouds comprised eight separate parts, at
least seven of which had originally been mounted
as fusuma, or sliding doors, as indicated by the
losses in the paper where the finger-pulls, or hikite,
would have been fitted. A central part of the
composition between the continuous left four
and right four sections is missing. Only two sections
of Hawk are extant. A photo taken in 1912,
shortly after the acquisition of the works, shows
how they had been remounted, removed at some
point from their door structures and joined in
pairs, with white cotton borders and heavy paper
linings (Fig. 1).
Both paintings had unusually large and unexplained
areas of loss, perhaps due to their
hurried removal from architectural setting in
already damaged condition. It is possible that
they may have come from a neglected or abandoned
temple following the Haibutsu Kishaku
anti-Buddhist movement of the early years of the
Meiji period 1868-1874.
Losses in Dragon and Clouds had been infilled
with paper taken from now-missing sections of
Hawk. Although the two works were on paper of
matching sheet size and manufacture, the infills
taken from the ‘Hawk’ painting were darker in
tone and, in places, carried brush strokes and
imagery from the artwork (Fig. 2).
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
It was apparent that missing parts of the image
of the dragon painting had been repainted on
the infill paper. The repainted areas were discernable,
due to the use of an ink of a different
hue and sheen to the original. In some places
the repainting was skillfully executed, whereas
in others the brushwork was clumsy and awkward.
Furthermore, elements from the hawk
painting that were still visible in places beneath
the repainting created a confusing visual mix.
When the decision to treat both paintings was
taken, it raised the question of what to do with
the infills and repainted sections. To remove all
infills and retain only the original artwork would
have severely broken up the image and made it
difficult to read as a cohesive composition. To
keep all the historical infills would have retained
the distracting elements, the tonal mismatches
ICOM-CC Graphic Documents Working Group Interim Meeting | Vienna 17 – 19 April 2013
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