The Framers Forum

A customer has just sent me a photo of a frame asking that he would like the same or similar.
The frame width (as indicated by the approximately drawn red arrows) is 130mm (approx. 4 ½”) but he will settle for anything similar in the range 120-150mm.
He is an artist specialising in military portraits suitable for hanging in an officer’s mess, so he is looking for something flamboyant and golden, or as he put it “royal” looking.
Does anyone know where I can source the raw materials to fabricate something for him?

D&J Simons do this one
https://djsimons.co.uk/product/regency- ... old-heavy/

But you would have to add the leaves in the corners,looking at your photo, it's partly hand finished

That looks very like a Frinton pattern.

https://www.frintonframes.co.uk/frame-t ... ed-ribbed/

They'll make them up for you any size and finish. Not exactly cheap, but superb quality.

Getting the leaves is a hard one! Anyone who still has anything like that won't be overly willing to part with anything like that , if they still have a use for some things. Many years ago, you could still get such items from the now long gone Renaisance Mouldings. I still have some, but I am reduced to gluing broken ones together, or carving new onesfrom thin slices of MDF. I like to do the carving, with Lino cutting tools. Sorry, but I don't have enough to spare any and I use some of them to look at when I am trying to carve my own. Thin bits of MDF, once carved can be softened in a Kitchen vegetable steamer, to get them to mould in shape to fit the corners, before gluing them into position. I use an electric scroll saw to cut out the external shape and the reduced the thickness, with my band saw before attempting and carving.

If you start with a reasonable thick piece of MDF and then slice it down to a suitable thickness, you may be able to get more than one leaf out of each piece of MDF. However I would warn you that I find it a bit difficult to carve such thin sections of MDF and it's quite easy to mess them up, so expect some wastage. I'm only guessing, but someone such as Alan (a forum member with a CNC router), might consider making some leaves, but it does not sound like an easy task to me and may well be totally impracticable to do this. I hardly do any such work these days and to be honest, unless you have an available supply of such decorative leaves, doing work like this at a profit is a be of a tall order. Most repair jobs like this are a lot easier, because I can take an impression from an existing feature on the frame that I am repairing and cast a matching piece in resin.

Sorry to disappoint you, but making much money out of repairing such frames is not all that likely! I squeeze gappy corners back together in my Stanley frames vice after getting a bit of glue into the gap and if needed pop an extra nail, or too into the corner, or take an impression from somewhere else on the frame to reproduce a missing bit from wood repair resin, but these days that's about it. Most customers don't get old frames repaired anymore and the amount that they are willing to pay for a repair is fairly minimal as well. It is generally a good thing to have a reputation for being able to repair old and damaged frames, because people get to know that you can do more than other local competitors and this fact alone can bring some useful extra work you way, but you have to be good at doing stuff like this quite quickly to make it pay.

I agree with Prospero. Email Frinton Frames with a copy of the photo and ask them if they can match it. They aren't the cheapest, but the quality is excellent, and it is certainly cheaper than trying to do this yourself. We use Frinton frequently for this type of frame are highly recommend them.

If you can get the customer to pay the extra, then Frinton Gallery will be exellent.

That is definitely a Frinton moulding
if your client isn't bothered with the corner leaf then you can buy the raw base moulding, gessoed and decorated, from Mark at Compo Mouldings
paint on a red pigment based paint and stipple very lightly with a suitable gold paint finish with a natural wax when the paint is dry to slow tarnishing
starting lightly and building up gives more control over the finish

we own a collection of Victorian moulds here and mix compo to make decorated frames on raw wood bases we also make in house
there are examples on our website Kingswoodframes.com.
if you want any tips , let me know
Tim

Hi everyone, Thanks to you all for pointing me in the right directions.

Frinton do in fact manufacture a similar frame but the widest that they do is 77mm.
Gold Star goes to Steve N for the DJSimons link. This is the exact frame at 113mm. It seems that the artist had mis-heard from the portrait commissioner that the original frame was130mm.

Anyway, at £16.80 per foot, the base frame alone (without including the gilded acanthus leaves in the corners) was going to cost me about £400 but the end customer was only prepared to pay a maximum of £200 for the finished product. It seems that he has a friend in Brunei (Sultan someone or other) and he is going to ask him who locally frames his big portraits. Ho-hum.

How the rich stay rich, while we poor but honest artisans dine on stick and stone stew again.