As part of our summer fieldwork, Lauren Telepak and I created an inventory of, treated and rehoused the drawings in the first of four bundles of stained glass window cartoons from the Rudolph Buenz Collection.
Winterthur acquired the collection in four large bundles. Before our arrival, Lois Price had opened the smallest bundle and brought it to Conservation for inventory and rehousing.
We created an inventory of all 119 drawings and selected the ones that could be stored in document boxes for humidification and flattening. We dry-cleaned the drawings in non-image areas with soot-sponges, and humidified them in a sink-sized humidity chamber. The drawings were dried under felts.
The archivist wanted digital images of the drawings such that patrons could pre-view the drawings without handling them. So Lauren and I took digital images of all of the drawings. The smaller drawings we imaged on a copy stand, and the larger images we imaged on a slant-board in the main Photography studio at Winterthur. All told, we took over 200 images of the 119 drawings because each drawing had an overall image and some had detail shots as well.
As necessary, we locally humidified and flattened the larger drawings and mended them. Besides the 30 drawings we housed in document boxes, we created two standard sizes of rolled storage for the larger drawings, and made several custom sized rolled storage for the largest drawings. There were 55 drawings that were 24” wide or narrower that got rolled up by project, into 11 Mylar sleeves that were each 28” wide and then rolled. There were 19 drawings that were between 24” and 34” wide, and they were housed in five Mylar sleeves that were each 38” wide and then rolled. The 10 drawings that were larger than 34” were housed in four custom made Mylar sleeves mounted to paper tubes for support.
