George Washington Painting Gets New Frame, Touchup

The painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware'' is one of the most iconic and enduring images in American art, dazzling visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than a century.

But the painting will be out of sight until 2011 as the artwork gets a touchup and an ornate new frame and its gallery undergoes a renovation.

The process is elaborate, time-consuming and expensive, especially the one-of-a-kind frame.

For decades, the giant canvas -- measuring more than 21 feet by 12 feet -- has hung in the Met in a plain frame that did nothing for it, said Carrie Rebora Barratt, curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Met. In fact, “it minimized it,'' she said.

But a lucky find is changing that. A photograph was discovered showing the painting as it was displayed at an exhibition in 1864. In the photo, the golden frame surrounding Emanuel Leutze's masterwork is anything but simple.

There's a crest at the top, featuring an eagle, weapons and other symbols. A circular shield marks each corner. Along the bottom of the crest, a ribbon bears the words from George Washington's eulogy: “First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of his Countrymen.''

Leutze's work, painted in 1851, depicts Washington and his companions crossing an ice-strewn Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. Washington made that crossing on Dec. 25, 1776, as part of a surprise attack during the Revolutionary War.

Met officials turned to Eli Wilner, an expert whose company has made other frames for them, to take on the project of recreating this frame. And even for Wilner and his employees, old hands at the business, it has been a novel experience.

In the world of frame-making, “this is by far the largest complex project that anyone's ever undertaken in America,'' Wilner said.

Large is an understatement. The frame is enormous: Laid out sideways in Wilner's Queens workshop, it weighs a few thousand pounds and takes up more than 250 square feet, almost as much space as a small Manhattan studio apartment. And it's expensive. Wilner and the Met won't say how much the museum is paying, but Wilner said that anyone who wanted his company to repeat the effort could expect to pay around $800,000.

About 30 employees have been involved in the process since it began in November 2007. The primary one, Wilner said, was Felix Teran, a carver from Ecuador who was responsible for creating the crest piece for the top of the frame. Teran, who started carving as a child more than 30 years ago, said it took him almost eight months to create all the pieces for the crest.

These days, the workshop is a hive of activity. Standing inside one corner of the frame, a woman uses a paintbrush to apply a thin layer of clay to one of the circular shields. On another side, a woman delicately places one of the thousands of thin leaves of gold that will gild the wood. On the other end, some men use a handtool to burnish the gold leaf that's already been put in place, reducing the shininess to give the frame a matte look.

Wilner expects the project to be completed by the end of the March. And then they plan to hold onto it for about two years, as renovations to the American wing at the Met continue.

Those renovations are having to be done in a strange circumstance -- the painting is still on the second floor where it used to hang. That's because the Met has no real way of moving it. It can't fit into an elevator, and to roll it up as was done to first get it to the museum would cause damage.

Washington “crossed the Delaware but we can't get him off the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,'' Barratt said.

The painting has been moved to another section of the second floor while reconstruction work goes on, and is undergoing some conservation work.

Conservators Lance Mayer and Gay Myers have been working since late summer on the project, a week at a stretch, and hope to finish in April.

They have removed a layer of grime and deteriorating surface paint from the canvas and added a layer of varnish, making the painting clearer and the colors brighter and deeper.

“We've given it a chance to look its best,'' Myers said.

The renovations to the gallery spaces will also give the painting new prominence, Barratt said. The painting will be placed in such a way that visitors will have a 150-foot vista of it.

The combination of a cleaned painting and the elaborate frame “will just make the viewing experience magnificent,'' Barratt said.

She said the frame, the original of which Leutze had made specifically for his painting, has design elements that correlate to the details on the canvas.

“I just think Leutze knew what he was doing, that it's going to make sense compositionally in the way that a great frame should,'' she said.