Sculpture Repair and Conservation

This is a Tang Dynasty horse, one of many beautiful horses to come from China in the last century. There are many fakes being produced now, and we do sampling for a thermo-luminescent testing lab in Connecticut called Daybreak Nuclear. This process is the only way that most of these wonderful artifacts can be authenticated. Provenance is also very useful in dating, as in this case the horse came from a family that probably brought it into the U.S. around the end of the nineteenth century.

Most of these horses were made to go into graves, and hence there was no thought given to durability. Because of this, many Chinese horses and camels have broken legs, ears, and tails. In the case of this horse, the legs had been broken and mended so often that many pieces were actually missing. Thus, an originally weak structure had become completely unstable and required the unusual measure of drilling through the pieces with a diamond drill and anchoring them all together with the sturdy wires that you can see in the photograph. After that, the whole area could be filled and inpainted with some assurance that normal care would not break it again. (Conservation for a museum requires that any painting-to-match be done within the areas of new filling only and not cover any original material. This is called "inpainting.") The home environment is much more rigorous than a museum, and frequently repairs and adhesives are called for which are not usually used in museums, although they are reversible. Nonetheless, in a case such as this, we think the extreme measures are justified by the result of this antique restoration.