Just as a sour note can dull a symphony, the wrong frame can flatten the most magnificent of paintings. So when the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to reframe one of its most popular †and largest †paintings, it turned to framer extraordinaire Eli Wilner to recreate a surround for the monumental and historically important “George Washington Crossing the Delaware.”
For Wilner, this was the most challenging project to date for the firm he established 26 years ago this September. The artisan began his craft in a fifth floor walkup with $6,000 he earned running the framing department at another gallery where the sale of antique frames was not permitted. Those were the days when museums and galleries routinely discarded period frames in favor of the contemporary, or even the frameless, and Wilner was ready and waiting to scoop them up. Today, it is a different story; period frames are treasured and Wilner’s creations are highly esteemed.
Eli Wilner and Company is no stranger to important projects. The company counts among its clients, in addition to the Met, the Smithsonian, the White House, Yale University, the New-York Historical Society, for whom Wilner artisans have replicated and restored historically appropriate frames. Among the 10,000 or so frames the company has created, many were for such masterworks as John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X,” Winslow Homer’s “Morning Bell” and “Dora Maar” by Picasso.
The company has made loans of frames to a number of exhibits and has donated frames and services to other deserving institutions. Asked how he determines need, Wilner says, “They have only to ask.”
It was no small matter to reframe a painting too large to leave the second floor of the museum where it has awed visitors for more than a century. Eli Wilner and his artisans were charged with replicating an accurate surround for the picture, which at more than 21 by 12 feet, is one of the largest in the Met.
The frame is the most elaborate ever made for an American painting.
Created by German artist Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze in his Düsseldorf studio, the painting arrived in New York in February 1851 to great fanfare. According to Met curator Carrie Rebora Barratt, one Vermont viewer wrote home to his wife describing the magnificent painting but rued the absence of a frame. It went on public view in October of that year and by February 1852, some 50,000 people had paid to see it.
By the time it appeared at the New York Sanitation Commission Fair in April 1863, it hung in a spectacular gilt frame decorated with an eagle crest and patriotic emblems. The frame was made in New York by a highly talented but anonymous artist, according to Leutze’s design. While American artists of the era were only moderately interested in framing, Europeans explored frame design and chose carefully.
Leutze incorporated elements of “George Washington Crossing the Delaware” into the frame. There was an eagle and a shield with 13 stars and stripes, with spears, cannon and muskets, a sword, a regimental drum and a trunk signifying a lengthy stay away from home. A banner below is emblazoned with, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” from Henry Lee’s eulogy of Washington.
The painting was purchased by a New York collector on whose death it was sold to John Stewart Kennedy, founder of Kennedy Galleries, who donated it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1897. Since then, the picture, a heroic depiction of Washington’s first victory in the American Revolution on Christmas night in 1776, has charmed generations of school children and others.
It is the most widely viewed picture in the museum †impressive for its style, scale and the sentiments that it conveys, although its historic accuracy is another matter. It is allegorical rather than factual.
“George Washington Crossing the Delaware” arrived at the Met in a frame that Barratt describes as beautiful, although it was considerably less elaborate than the original. It was replaced in 1918 by another, simpler frame, believed to have been its third. As Wilner notes, the simple frame flattened the work.
Barratt had long been eyeing the possibility of reframing the painting †since as far back as 1990 when she was engaged in assessing the frames in the museum collection. She says she had long treasured the idea that someday she would find the original frame, but that was not meant to be.
The painting had been due for cleaning and conservation; the expansion and reconstruction of the American wing provided the perfect window of opportunity for the yearlong process, now complete. Simultaneously, in what Barratt describes as a perfect alignment of the planets, her attention was directed by a colleague to the New-York Historical Society, which owns an album of Mathew Brady’s 1864 photographs of the New York Sanitary Commission Fair that depicted the painting in its original frame. The historical society digitized the photographs for the Met.
Enter Eli Wilner and Company and the master carver, Ecuador-born Feliz Teran, whom Barratt calls the best carver in New York. Wilner says Teran is the only carver in the country who could carve this frame. The task was the replication of Leutze’s original frame, a powerful tour de force of gilt, carved with an eagle, a banner and other patriotic symbols. Teran was responsible for the 12-foot crest; it took him nearly eight months to carve its various components.
Although the painting had been rolled up for its journey to America, its age rendered that impossible today. Accordingly, the frame was created offsite at the Eli Wilner Studios in Long Island City while the painting remained at home on the second floor of the museum. Wilner artisans worked from the digitized image of the Brady photograph and were able to discern detail of the original frame to within an eighth of an inch. The project began in November 2007 and has employed the talents of some 30 of the 40 artists in the studio.
Framing methods have changed little over the centuries, although some technological improvements have been made. The process begins with the careful selection of lumber, which is then spliced together to create the width of the finished piece. Shapers form it; then, it is cast. Carvers shape the casting and gesso is added and subsequently sanded. It is then gilded and burnished, then finished. Each process is executed by a different department at Wilner’s gallery.
While carving was the province of Teran, gilding was carried on by other artisans and required more than 12,500 3½-inch-square sheets of gold leaf, each 1/250,000th of an inch thick.
Wilner describes the Washington project as the most important he has ever undertaken, and certainly the most challenging of his career. He said he is most pleased with the fact that he will always be able to see the frame with a simple stop at the Met. He has completed 28 projects for the White House, but he is less free to drop by for a look in the Oval Office.
Of the Leutze picture, he finds it most moving to be connected to a project involving the quintessential American icon.
The frame was completed in early June, but because of its size cannot be assembled until the framing process. It will be stored at the Met until the second floor galleries for American paintings and sculpture open, sometime in mid-2011. The museum remains open through construction.
The actual framing is no simple process: The painting will be attached to steel beams embedded in the gallery walls and the approximately 3,000-pound frame will be reassembled and attached to the wall separately. The painting will serve as a welcome to the American galleries, visible from a vista of 100 yards through an enfilade of galleries, said Barratt.
Eli Wilner loves frames; he often finds them far more beautiful than the pictures they surround. He describes them as “sculpture, as good as any fine bronze.” His affinity may stem from early childhood and the influence of an uncle who was a collector of paintings and of frames. He was in the habit of framing his young nephew’s “kid art” in handsome antique frames, leading Wilner to believe that he was a very good artist, indeed. He says not, however. He certainly possesses a good eye and a highly refined aesthetic. When he arrived in New York after college, Wilner thought the perfect job would be a guard at the Met. He hired on at a gallery instead, and the rest is history.
The Eli Wilner gallery holds a collection of 2,600 antique frames. Wilner says he selects frames for particular paintings based on historic and aesthetic precedent. “There needs to be a marriage with the content of the picture,” he says, the frame never dominates. Even better is when a frame resonates with elements in the painting.
The creation of the Leutze frame from a photograph is not the first time the gallery has been so charged. A huge painting by Thomas Moran was also replicated from a photo. And the Leutze frame is not the first time the gallery has replicated a frame for a George Washington painting. The company created a replica of an early Nineteenth Century frame with an eagle on the top and shields at the corners for the circa 1800 “Equestrian Portrait of George Washington” by Rembrandt Peale.
For Edwin Lord Weeks’ “The Golden Temple of Amritsar,” circa 1890, Wilner produced a replica of a Nineteenth Century Orientalist frame. Among the 28 frames made for the White House is a replica of a “Hassam frame” so called for the carved letter “H” on the top rail for Childe Hassam’s 1917 “Avenue in the Rain.”
Frida Kahlo’s “Roots,” circa 1943, was given a shaped and silver gilded frame from around 1920 and the painting then brought a record price at Sotheby’s. Wilner’s current project is the reframing of the last painting by Sixteenth Century Venetian artist Jacopo Bassano, a large composition that requires an expansion of the frame by two feet.
It is not all history, however. If your plasma television is obtrusive, Eli Wilner and Company can provide the perfect frame to suit the setting.
Eli Wilner and Company is at 1525 York Avenue. For information, 212-744-6521 or www.eliwilner.com .
