The National Trust in the UK is establishing a new paint archive that will amalgamate thousands of historical paint samples, complete with laboratory facilities, for the first time. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this project is set to be developed over the next two years at the Royal Oak Foundation Conservation Studio in Kent. Professional conservators, students, and the public will have access to these samples, enabling new studies of past conservation techniques and materials. Highlights include an opportunity to utilize modern technology to reevaluate older samples, revealing important insights into art conservation.
We've always sampled things for specific questions about those individual objects, and those reports, those images, those samples exist. Now we want to bring them together so that we can study across them.
The samples are miniature cultural assets packed with answers to questions yet to be asked, and the archive raises the intriguing prospect of revisiting older samples with the benefit of current technology and expertise.
When I first studied painting conservation, nobody really knew what a lead soap was, but now it's a feature that everybody understands.
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