PRESERVATION OF WALLPAPERS AS PARTS OF INTERIORS

Task of conservation. Case studies
need to educate all of the specialists working on historic buildings.
In Estonia, not much is known about historic wallpapers,
since hardly any research has been carried out and wallpapers
are very seldom preserved. Besides, even professionals working
with other decorative surfaces or details might not have
any experience or knowledge of historic wall covers, which frequently
leads to misinterpreting the whole conception of room
decoration. To avoid any further damage caused by ignorance,
conservators should educate their colleagues about the properties
and importance of historic wallpapers, as well as options
for preserving them.
One of the most crucial examples of the lack of communication
in the museum follows. A sub-contractor of a company
responsible for conserving historic ovens in the whole building
had not been informed of the plan to preserve the historic wallpaper.
About 0.5 centimetres of a wallpaper strip covered the
edge of an oven in the papered room. Although it was a common
practice to cover the edges of door frames and ovens with
a wallpaper, it was seen as a hindrance by a worker who had
been employed to clean the ovens. As a result, a great amount
of wallpaper surrounding the oven was ripped off the wall in
small pieces. (Fig. 155, Fig. 156) This damage was a result of
the fact that in other rooms no historic wallpapers had survived
and so it seemed ”obvious” that this particular wallpaper should
be removed. The pieces of the wallpaper were salvaged from a
dustbin, cleaned, consolidated and remounted.
Besides the above-mentioned damage, there were other
extensive losses, or lacunae, that needed to be filled. To fill them
there were two options: use pieces of the original material or
use reconstructions. If possible the original material should be
used, since its properties (thickness, texture, colour and pattern)
correspond to the wallpaper on the wall. Reconstruction,
no matter how well it has been carried out, can only imitate
the original. In the museum, pieces of wallpaper were removed
from behind the radiator and above the oven. Since the surface
behind the radiator was supposed to be consolidated and additional
holes for installing a new radiator were going to be drilled,
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