Two historic paintings returned to the lobby of City Hall looking better than they have for generatinos after undergoing a makeover to remove dirt and grime as well as repairing damages.
The paintings show how Watertown looked in 1630, when the Town was founded, and the year that Town Hall opened, 1930. After nearly two years away, the paintings were reinstalled on Nov. 13 after a thorough cleaning and restoration project spearheaded by the Historic Society of Watertown, and paid for with Community Preservation Act funds.
During their absence, the paintings were at the studio of art preservationist Louise Orsini. She removed two significant layers, an orange one and as well as one that was dark grey.
“It was built up in layers over the years,” she said. “The first layers that came off were grime and a lot of nicotine, which is very orange. And below that there was a lot of soot which would have been from the heating system at the time.”
Orsini also found areas where the original artwork had been damaged. The edges had wear, and it appeared tacks had been pushed into the painting at some point.
“In this case, and with many restoration projects, we use a paint that is conservation grade so it has really excellent aging properties and it is reversible from the original material because in 50 or 100 years the paint that I added and the original paint will look different again because the paint I added will age,” Orsini said. “It can change so it can be retouched or it can actually be removed and completely redone in 100 years if somebody needs to do that.”
After cleaning the substances that covered the painting over the years, and repairing the damage, the details of the painting and the quality of the work can now be seen. Joyce Kelly, from the Historical Society, got the chance to see the work in progress at Orsini’s studio and remarked at the transformation.
“We went there three weeks ago, maybe a month ago, and they look so much cleaner, so much brighter,” Kelly said. “All of the scratches are gone, a lot of the tack holes are gone, and everything is just much more bright.”
The restoration was one of the first projects funded with CPA dollars, said Lanae Handy, Watertown’s Community Preservation Coordinator.
“It has been a long time coming,” Handy said. “These paintings came down in December of 2022, so it took quite a bit of time. But we are very excited to have them back.”
Putting them back on the wall was not a simple job. The paintings had originally been screwed into concrete with only a thin layer of plaster covering it. The crew of workers from Maquette Fine Arts Services had to drill holes in the concrete to put in plugs into which they could put in the screws.
The screws secured not just the paintings, they also held the brass trim, said Andrew Haines, an independent frame conservator who worked at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) for 30 years. Haines had to recreate some of the trim using an alternate material.
“When I came to see the job three or four of the brass pieces were off the paintings and two of them were stored elsewhere,” Haines said. “During the process of the job they found another piece somewhere in the building, so now we are just down to two pieces and I replicated them in wood because I wasn’t able to source somebody who could copy the brass to make these brass strips.”
The brass trim fits with the Art Deco design popular when City Hall was built.
“They go around the perimeter and have a certain amount of flash,” Haines said. “It’s kind of wonderful: the stone and the brass. It’s a really good look that is fun to see and it is period for the building.”
One solution that could not be found was who is the artist or artists behind the paintings. Kelly and others visited the Boston Athenaeum to look at notebooks made by R. Clipson Sturgis, the architect who designed City Hall.
“The one for this building was not there, and it was never donated to them and we don’t know where that is,” Kelly said. “It might have told us who the artist was, but we checked in newspapers, and we couldn’t find the artists in newspapers either.”
The paintings once again sit in the walls of City Hall, and now have railings around them created by Will Twombly, and his son Alex. Will, a Watertown resident who works on museum exhibits around the area, made the oak railings, and Alex (who grew up in town and now lives in Providence) made the metal part of the railings.