AIC's 47th Annual Meeting

Iris by Hishida Shunso, came into the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston collection in 2011, unglazed, unlined and most surprisingly, still mounted on its original stretcher from 1905. It was too brittle to be removed from the stretcher, lined with paper and mounted onto a new Japanese style panel frame, as would normally be done with a Japanese painting of this type. The curator also wanted the stretcher and translucency of the painting preserved for historical reasons. Severe foxing due to prolonged, unprotected display marred the appearance of the painting. Any attempts to reduce the soiling and foxing needed to use minimal moisture because of the sensitivity of the silk support to changes in humidity and the tension on the stretcher. Treatment benefited from two methods borrowed from Paper and Textile conservation: Agarose gels with EDTA and Gellan gum gels with deionized water were used to reduce the extremely disfiguring foxing, and a Lascaux-impregnated crepeline lining supported the painting so it could remain on its original stretcher.