Further work on a fine Victorian neo-classical frame chosen to fit a Scottish ruralist artist from the late 1800's.
The story here is that the customer has a painting by William Darling McKay which came in an awful 1970's repro frame and he'd been looking for ages for a suitable frame to fit.
The painting has a rather unusual size, so he had to go to auctions to find something that could be cut down or adjusted to fit and he finally came across this one which was closest both in style and size.
The frame is known as a Barbizon frame, so called after the French Barbizon style of painting which was to celebrate and display all the elements of outdoor nature.
This is reflected in the ornament and style of the frame which has lots of leafy foliage and berries garnished all around the perimeter.
The frame is taller than the painting, so that bit was easy enough as all I had to do was shorten the two side pieces.
The painting however was about one and a half inches wider so the only way to accommodate that was to move the sight edge and rebate deeper into the frame profile.
Luckily the frame was an extravagant eight inches wide, so the profile wouldn't have missed or noticed the removal of some elements from the centre area.
You can see that from the photos,
In this photo I've cut away the front section along the orange line and then machined out the hatched area.
This was done so that same front section could be lifted back and replaced inside that channel.
This photo shows how the remodelled profile fitted together,
Of course I had to create an infill moulding to make up the length shortage of the front section and as the gilding was pretty manky on the other three sections, it was better to strip back to the gesso and be able to create an homogeneous finish over the entire inner section of the frame.
As mentioned before, the frame was stuffed with hidden nails coming in from all directions. There was no way this frame could be allowed anywhere near a wood working mitre saw.
The only way to mitre it was to make a mitre box and use both handsaws and hacksaws to recreate the corners.
I made this mitre box from a length of both R&H A333 and A339.
The slots for the saws were cut to an accurate 45deg on the double mitre saw.
The next bit was to join up the frame.
That was where the heavy work came in.
There is no area on this frame which is accurately flat so each corner had to be man-handled together and fastened in situ.
For this I roped in our main Pembrokeshire framer, one Justintime and had him arm-wrestle the frame down on to the bench and use his skilled eye to clamp each corner tight.
I in turn, drilled in from both sides and fastened deep counter-sinking screws so as to hold the heavy frame together whilst the glue dried.
The glue we used was called Cascamite and that takes a few days to dry hard but aside from it's strength, has the unique property of being a generous gap filler.
And here we have the frame all joined up the right size and ready for filling all the gaps and cracks and further gilding.
