PRESERVATION OF WALLPAPERS AS PARTS OF INTERIORS

Task of conservation. Case studies
The most outstanding rooms, such as the painted entrance
hall, two small parlours and a part of a large artist’s studio in
Hans Makart style, have survived. The conservation process of
the museum building and its interiors started in 2005, with the
aid of donations gathered by the Rotary Club Bucharest.
5.3.2. Situation preceding conservation
The walls of the parlour next to the artist’s studio had been covered
with an embossed wallpaper imitating gilded leather. It is
not known when the wallpaper was attached to the wall. There
is no photographic or textual evidence of the decorative work
carried out in the house, since the whole personal archive of
Theodor Aman perished in a fire during the Romanian Revolution
in 1989.
The embossed wallpaper was restored and remounted in
September 2011. The author of the thesis worked on the wallpaper
under the supervision of Markus Krön.
A few rooms of the building and the artist’s garden were
depicted in the paintings of Theodor Aman, for example his
representative studio, his private studio on the second floor of
the museum and the boudoir of his wife, Ana Aman 423 , but not
the mentioned parlour.
In 2005 the wallpaper was dismounted by a local conservator,
Mrs. Rodica Antonescu, after which the walls were cleaned
and plastered. No research concerning earlier layers, historic
lining paper, method of mounting or possible signs left by a wallpaper
hanger was carried out. Mrs. Antonescu did not provide
any documentation about the former condition of the object
or the following process of conservation. Thus one could only
assume in what way the wallpaper was applied to the wall and
whether it formed the first decorative layer dating back to the
end of the 1860s or was a later application.
The pattern of the wallpaper depicts simplified and symmetrically
ordered acanthus scrolls covered with fish scales, a
head of a horned, grinning man and two dragons holding a chain
423
Interview with Simona Predescu, conservator in Theodor Aman Museum, Bucharest,
Romania on September 26, 2011.
247