Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Drawing by Daniel M. C. Hopping. From the book American interiors, 1675-1885: a guide to the American
period rooms in the Brooklyn Museum by Marvin D. Schwartz.

Museum libraries and archives are rich storehouses of textual and visual information. This is very true of the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives which function as the “story tellers” of the Museum by providing histories about objects in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Hidden within the Libraries and Archives are a myriad of stories concerning the Schenck houses, which were recently renovated and reinstalled on the fourth floor of the Museum.

Photograph by Reverend William Edward Schenck. From Account of my trips to Holmdel, N.J. & Flatlands, L.I. by William Edward Schenck.

One can find several fascinating books, photographs and other documents in the Libraries and Archives that tell about the Schenck family and the houses they lived in. Highlights include photographs from the Historic American Building Survey and an original journal by Jane Malbone Schenck who wrote about what her life was like in Brooklyn in the 1800’s. A selection of these documents are currently on view in the Library display cases on the second floor of the Museum.

These documents are of great interest to many, including architectural historians of Brooklyn who want to know what Brooklyn looked like when the Schenck houses were built more than 330 years ago. These documents tell us about the houses, the transfer of owners and families and the re-emerging of the architecture through refurbishments and significant structural transformations. The photographs tell us about the transformation of the surrounding landscape from sweeping meadows to a Brooklyn neighborhood. They also provide evidence of how the houses have looked as they have been installed at the Brooklyn Museum.

Jan Martense Schenck House reinstallation. Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Decorative Arts.
Exhibitions: Schenck House reinstallation, 1971.

2008 is the 185th anniversary of the founding of this institution as a library (the Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library) and we are planning a series of talks about the history of the Library and the rare and unique collections held in this repository. We will be focusing on the materials related to the Schenck family in this upcoming series. Please email us at library@brooklynmuseum.org if you would like to know more about the talk or Schenck related materials in the Libraries and Archives.

For a complete history on the Schenck Houses, see Kevin Stayton’s book, Dutch by design : tradition and change in two historic Brooklyn houses : the Schenck houses at The Brooklyn Museum, available in the Museum Libraries. Additional installation images of the Schenck house can be found in our online exhibition index.

Q: What does it take to install the Period Rooms?

A: A whole lot of people!

In future posts, we’ll describe how the Schenck House was moved, but right now we are in the thick of preparing the entire floor to re-open to the public. A great deal of dust was generated from the construction of the past two years. Melanie Tran is pictured here vacuuming chairs in the Danbury Room. Melanie is a volunteer in the Conservation Lab, who is interested in attending a graduate training program in art conservation. Getting experience in a conservation lab is one of the requirements for a graduate program.

Here are two of the Museum’s art handlers, Jason and Jim, working with our current intern from the University of Delaware graduate program in art conservation, Jakki Godfrey. They are reinstalling the doors on a piece of furniture called a kas. The kas was recently treated anoxically for a pest infestation. The object was placed in a chamber and the oxygen was exchanged for argon gas, causing the wood eating insects to be exterminated. This technique has the advantage of not leaving toxic residues behind.

The vacuuming and reinstalling will continue for the next couple of weeks.

Please come and visit when the rooms open!

Lisa Bruno

Objects Conservator

The Jan Martense Schenck House is scheduled to re-open to the public in July. It has moved from its original location on the 4th floor to a new location that situates it next to the house of Nicholas Schenck, the grandson of Jan Martense. For those of you who have been coming to the Brooklyn Museum to visit the house since you were kids, and for those of you who have been bringing your children to visit the house, you may notice a bigger difference than simply the change in location. The house, formerly a dark blue when first installed at the Museum has been entirely re-painted deep red, including the trim!

The Jan Martin Schenck House came into the collection in 1950, and was assembled in the 1960’s on the 4^th floor of the Museum in the location that is currently occupied by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. When assembled at the Museum, some of the wooden siding was included in the architectural components, but new siding had to be reproduced at the museum to completely finish the house. At that time, the house was painted dark blue, with a white trim.

To make way for the construction of The Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art which houses The Dinner Party, The Schenck House was disassembled and moved. Jim Boorstein of Traditional Line, an architectural conservation firm, was contracted to undertake this part of the project.

Detail of paint cross section showing the lowest red, and green paint layers, followed by several layers of white.

So why did we change the color from the dark blue to barnyard red? Obviously, any wooden frame house that remained standing in Brooklyn from the 17^th century to the early 20^th, would have been repaired and repainted numerous times as part if its maintenance and up-keep. In trying to understand the paint scheme, we took paint cross sections from the oldest existing pieces of wood siding that were present. This is a way to see what was the paint layer sequence. A small piece of paint is mounted into resin and polished smooth so that the layers can be seen in cross section underneath a polarizing light microscope. This work was done for us by Jamie Martin at Orion Analytical.

It needs to be said that we do not know the age of the wooden siding, and it is unlikely that it is part of the original siding from 1675-1677 when the house was thought to have been built, but it was a place to start.

Our original question was, “Why did they paint the Schenck House blue in the 1960’s installation?”. In examining the cross section, we found no evidence of a blue paint layer in the oldest existing paint from the house. Underneath the uppermost blue layer, which was applied by the Museum, were many layers of white paint, followed by a broken up green layer and an equally distressed red layer directly on top of the wood siding.

Consulting with Dr. Barry Harwood, Curator of Decorative Arts, it was thought that the numerous layers of white represent the painting scheme from the 19th c. onwards, as white was a popular color to paint a wood frame house, during that time period. The green and the red layers could therefore represent the colors the house was painting in the time before the 19thc. From this physical evidence on the cross section, and with the Curatorial expertise provided by Dr. Harwood, regarding the history of 17th and 18th c. houses, the Museum came to the decision to repaint the house red, to represent the oldest known existing paint color.

Dr. Harwood, and Museum Designer Lance Singletary worked with the Museum’s painters to achieve a color and a surface texture that would be in keeping with 17th c. housing painting practices.

We hope you enjoy visiting the newly painted, and newly installed house!

Lisa Bruno, Objects Conservator

In 2004, the Jan Martense Schenck House was completely dismantled to make room for the construction of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The house was disassembled by the conservation firm Traditional Line, Ltd. and stored for a brief period before being re-erected in its new location on our Fourth Floor. The Museum’s conservators, designers and installation teams are still working on finishing touches and it will re-open to the public in mid-July 2007. The house is a local favorite around here, so it will be nice to see it go back on view soon.

Click To Play (Flash 9 Required)

One of the great things about my job is coordinating materials for the website. For Schenck, we had four hours of video footage from the 2004 de-installation, so I created this short slideshow of the de-installation process using iMovie. I personally found it interesting to see how much video quality has changed in the past three years. This was filmed on what was considered a high-end consumer camera back in 2004, but you can see it’s pretty grainy and we’ve kept the images small to avoid further distortion. Still, it serves as a pretty good record of the process of taking the house apart for storage. If you are curious to know more about the de-installation process, David Owen wrote this Talk of the Town article for the September 2006 issue of the New Yorker.

The 2007 re-installation was also well documented and with much newer technology, so we’ll be posting some great shots from that process in the next month.