Recently at Newport Art Museum we took down a group of portrait paintings that had ben on extended loan from Newport Historical Society. The paintings are quite old and rather delicate, so they must be handled observing museum best practices for objects and works of art. The portraits of Newport people from ages past had been displayed in the stairwell of the museum’s Griswold House, and had accumulated some dust during their exhibition. Thus, the paintings needed to be taken down, inspected and dusted before being wrapped with archival material for moving to climate controlled storage.
That doesn’t sound terribly challenging for staff trained in such care, does it? What if said paintings were 18 feet above a stairwell in an 1864 house? A bit more of a challenge!
This animation gives an idea of what was needed:
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http://giphy.com/gifs/IlqbEMaBTacs8/html5