NEW YORK, NY.- In honor of their 40th anniversary,
Eli Wilner has announced that they again have matching grants available to cover part of the cost of selected replica reframing and frame restoration projects for museums. To apply, interested institutions should email the details of their reframing or frame restoration projects to info@eliwilner.com. No project is too small or too large.
Wilner is very proud of two frames that they recently created for the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut, that were made possible through this program, for paintings by Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt.
The largest project completed through the matching grant program was the recreation of a monumental frame for Emanuel Leutze’s 12-by-21-foot painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, based on the discovery of long-lost documentary photographs by Mathew Brady. The original frame shown in the Brady photographs had been inexplicably lost. The Wilner staff spent years doing in-depth research alongside the Met’s curators, and meticulously handcrafting the frame. The frame has a wide cove profile with acanthus leaf and leaf-and-berry cast ornaments. In addition to the crest, hand-carved elements include the embellished shields at the corners and individual stars set inside the cove. Using over 12,500 sheets of gold, the entire frame surface was water-gilded in the traditional fashion. The frame was so massive that it had to be designed for on-site assembly and was carried up the Museum’s Grand Stairwell in sections.
This project was featured in a six-minute interview on CBS Sunday Morning that can be viewed at EliWilner.com.
Eli Wilner & Company has completed over 15,000 framing projects for private collectors, museums, and institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and 28 projects for The White House. Wilner was honored by the Historic Charleston Foundation with the Samuel Gaillard Stoney Conservation Craftsmanship Award, for their work in historic picture frame conservation.
