VCA November Member’s Meeting at Virginia Museum of History & Culture
Join us at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond for our November meeting! From 4:30-5:00, VCA members are welcome to tour the current special exhibits, Give Me Liberty and/or Un/Bound: Free Blacks in Virginia, 1619 to 1865. Enjoy refreshments in the Lacy Meeting Room beginning at 5:00 with our main presentation from Carey Howlett “Scientific Imaging and Southern Furniture: Revealing Inscriptions and Refuting Impressions” from 6:00-7:00 pm.
Inscriptions on historic American furniture, whether by the maker, owner, or user are rare and prized as a means to link a piece to a particular person, place or time. Inscriptions also tend to be somewhat problematic, as they can be nearly invisible, poorly scribbled, worn or obscured by grime. Fortunately, conservators have an effective toolbox for deciphering otherwise obscured inscriptions. By using a range of multi-spectral photographic and image processing techniques, conservators can clarify indiscernible handwriting. At the same time, these techniques sometimes reveal suspected inscriptions as simply misconstrued marks or patterns of human or natural origin. We will examine imaging techniques used to reveal information on some remarkable examples of historic American southern furniture, including two pieces from the VMFA collection. We will see intriguing inscriptions on the Virginia furniture of John Shearer that express both his eccentric, irascible personality as well as his loyalty to the British crown well into the nineteenth century.
We will also review imaging carried out to re-examine “inscriptions” published in The WH Cabinetmaker: A Southern Mystery Solved, a book purporting to identity the maker of an important idiosyncratic group of North Carolina furniture. The follow-up study used a variety of photographic techniques to reveal some of the purported inscriptions as misinterpreted script and others as completely imaginary impressions, thus contesting the authors’ attribution. The follow-up images appear in the article “Scientific Imaging Techniques and New Insights on the WH Cabinetmaker: A Southern Mystery Continues” (F. C. Howlett and Kathy Gillis, American Furniture 2013).
Imaging techniques to be discussed include Infrared reflectography, UV-reflected and UV fluorescence photography, RTI (Reflected Transformation Imaging), and digital image enhancement using software designed for biomedical research and adapted for examining rock art. The presentation will include information on the cameras, lenses, filters, set-ups and software used to carry out these techniques.