Lunch at the Library: Conservation on a Grand Scale - APS Conservators Anne Downey and Renée Wolcott

Join us for a Lunch at the Library talk from APS Conservators Anne Downey and Renée Wolcott about the history, diagnosis, and treatment of Audubon’s Birds of America.

John James Audubon—naturalist, slaveholder, ambitious upstart—was a divisive figure even in his own day. He wanted his Birds of America—a project that depicted 435 North American birds at life size—to eclipse the work of all previous ornithologists, and he stopped at nothing to achieve his goal. The APS Library—despite internal resistance to Audubon and his work—possesses a copy of the rare elephant double folio of Birds of America (1827-1839), and the first volume is now on exhibit in the APS Museum's Sketching Splendor: American Natural History 1750-1850.

In preparation for the exhibition, however, curators and conservators noticed a strange purple-gray haze obscuring many of the prints' dark passages. This lunchtime presentation will discuss the conservators' diagnosis and treatment of the problem, which included sampling and analysis of the haze, consultation with colleagues and scientific literature, many rounds of testing, and media consolidation on a massive scale. The talk will also place the prints within their historical context: Audubon's working methods, how the prints were made, and how his magnum opus was acquired and cared for by the APS.

Learn more about the APS: https://www.amphilsoc.org