AIC's 45th Annual Meeting

The Old Whaler's Church, designed by Minard Lafever, was built in the Egyptian Revival style in 1844 with an ornate Greek Revival interior. Due to financial constraints, the curved apse was replaced by a flat wall during the construction. A 40' long x 25' high trompe l'oeil mural was painted to provide the illusion of the curved apse. Over 170 years, the original mural was overpainted six times. We were commissioned to research the original, encapsulate what remained and to faithfully reproduce the original. In 2013, our team spent ten days meticulously removing at least six layers of overpaint to allow full scale mapping of the original layout from the exposures, detailed information on the hand(s) and stylistic approach of the original team of artists and the use of two late 1800's photographs to provide accurate data to allow a faithful replication of the mural. In the summer of 2014, we were contracted to reproduce the original mural. This was achieved in 12 weeks. We will detail the original research, including the paint stratigraphy prepared by our paint analyst, and review the methodology applied and the resulting replication.