This series of photographs partially document the transformation of a pair of ancestral portraits from the American South. The original pre-Civil war frames carry the labels of a New Orleans art supplier, and one of the frames had been recently smashed by a moving company.
According to family tradition the paintings had been "slashed by Yankee bayonets during the Civil War", and one eye of the woman had been painted over a former restorer's patch. The paintings were cleaned, lined in a vacuum press to flatten the cracks, and a new eye was perfectly re-painted by Deborah Kravitz. The broken frame fragments were re-joined, the missing gesso elements re-cast, fit and the gold matched to the original surface.
Courtesy Private Collection