Stencil Secrets, Archive Answers
Replicating Historic Finishes Using Digital Archives
With a lot of patience and a little luck, digital archives can be an amazing resource for rediscovering even the most ephemeral decorative arts.
While prepping a wall for painting inside one of the former great resort hotels in the Delaware Water Gap, painters discovered fragments of a painted stencil. In an effort to preserve this piece of the building’s history, the owner contacted JBC to see if we could determine the original appearance of this painted finish.
The work began with a cross-sectional investigation of paint samples to determine the historic colors and their location on the wall and in the stratigraphy of paint layers. Once we identified the finish (distemper paints and clear glazes), we returned to the site to perform exposure reveals. The fragility of the original painted stencil made it difficult to remove the upper layers of paint without damaging the stencil. Therefore, we used raking light to find details and patterns telescoping through the paint. This information was combined with the limited areas of exposed stencil.
Figure 1: Remnants of stencil visible through paint layers.
As patterns were deciphered, they were copied onto tracing paper. A specific starburst pattern around a small dot was noted and then the length of the wall was searched at that height for a repeat starburst. Once found, the distance between the dots in the starbursts was measured to determine the length of the stencil. The height was also measured. This information was used to define the size of stencil for which we were searching.
Multiple stencil pattern books were searched from our in-house library, Google Books, Google Image Search, and the APT Building Technology and Heritage Library (an online digitized collection which includes thousands of out of print architectural and construction trade catalogs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).
After searching, a match was found at the APT Heritage Library. Stencil #577 in the Blue Label Brand Stencils catalogue published in 1900 by Geo. E. Watson, Co. had the same central starburst and dentil borders.
Figure 2: Blue Label Brand Stencils catalogue. Matching Stencil #577 is indicated.
Although the stencil can no longer be purchased, we were able to enlarge the 3/4-inch sample from the catalogue to its full-scale 10-inch height to replicate the original pattern.
Figure 3: Closer view of Stencil #577 matching original decorative finish.
Having access to these digital archives proved an invaluable resource without which we might have never been able to recreate this nearly-lost decorative finish.