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Rediscovering 1895
Restoring a long-time hidden ceiling mural

This rediscovered 1895 mural was revived and restored to its rightful place.

Here was a different sort of commission: rather than being asked to create a new work, Diane Williams was offered the prospect of saving a mural her client had just discovered in the ceiling. Originally painted around 1895, it was hidden under several layers of paint and paper, discolored by soot from the fireplace below and damaged by water from above. The homeowner realized it was a spectacular find and put off the rest of her home projects to focus on reviving the irreplaceable artwork.

One reason the mural was covered over, they think, was due to cracks in the ceiling. “These original cracks had been newly mudded in the belief that the ceiling would get a full makeover with a fresh new coat of paint,” said Williams. Now, however, the mud had to go. Working with colleague Lori Wilson, they spent many hours in rubber gloves with buckets of water and sponges, wiping it away, slowly revealing a hunt scene that showed trees, bucks, a border of a trompe l’oeil and sprays of flowers. The substrate, the type of paint, the original colors ... all the products used 125 years ago would remain a mystery.

The homeowner wanted to keep the current soot-darkened appearance, and the team set out to match from there. “We could tell that many colors and layers of glazes were used to create the backgrounds, so we needed to determine the original base color, then determine the glaze colors that tinted the background,” said Williams. “Once we had a color we felt good about, we would hold it next to the original mural to make sure we had matched it.

“We created patterns of the original floral sprays and then traced them onto the new sections of the ceiling in the placement we thought they would have originally been painted,” she continued. “The final steps included recreating the shading and highlighting the original trompe l’oeil work, hand painting the florals and recreating the display of caught fish and birds. We painted a tinted water-based varnish over the entire mural to protect the new work and to tone and age it so our newly painted sections blended unnoticeably into the original. This project was very exciting for me as I’ve never worked on something so old and precious.”

the crew worked long hours carefully removing the drywall mud from the ceiling.   The old mural starts to reappear. Restoration in progress.

Key Products

• Golden Fluid Acrylics
• Proceed Decorative Paints
• Faux Effects Acrylics