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An internship in painting conservation at the Australian National Gallery

My employment in the Paintings Section of the Conservation Department
of the Australian National Gallery began in June 1983, however my
internship did not begin until March 1984 under the supervision of
Allan Byrne.
At that time, the paintings section was divided, rather arbitrarily,
into: paintings pre-1940, headed by Ilse King and; paintings
post-1940, headed by Allan Byrne.
Because of the departure of the then senior curator of conservation Dr
Nathan Stolow, Allan Byrne became acting senior curator. When Allan
Byrne took up the position of lecturer in paintings conservation at
C.C.A.E., Ilse King then became acting senior curator and my
supervisor; the division within the painting section was then
disbanded.
Jac Macnaughtan departed temporarily from the department to undertake
study and to work at the Tate Gallery and at the Courtauld Institute
in London leaving me with the paintings section.
I was fortunate enough to have at first one assistant Simon Hartas,
then two assistants, Mark Henderson and Les Cormack to help with the
task of backing, framing and restretching paintings.
There was no formal training programme for an intern - work was
undertaken as it came into the department and as it was allotted.
For the sake of simplicity and ease of handling the dissertation is
divided into 3 parts:
Part 1 includes the Functions and Facilities of the conservation
department.
Part 2 includes an outline of painting conservation practice within
the gallery and details of conservation work undertaken.
Part 3 comprises a project on some of the properties of hardboard.
As the gallery has in its collection a considerable number of
paintings on hardboard, to augment my knowledge and perhaps give some
insight into the nature of hardboard, this project was undertaken in
conjunction with the internship.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219411
Date January 1985
CreatorsUrquhart, Ian McLeod, n/a
PublisherUniversity of Canberra. Applied Science
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Rights), Copyright Ian McLeod Urquhart

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