Who was Elizabeth Keith?? Those in the know can skip this part, but if you are like me, the answer was – “Qui?”

As I have since learned, she was a self-taught British artist who, in 1915, travelled to Tokyo to visit her sister. Long story short, she fell in love with the Orient, and held an exhibit of locally inspired watercolours and drawings, that caught the attention of Shosaburo Watanabe.

Before treatment

After treatment

Watanabe was a publisher with a vision and an art marketer extraordinaire. He revived the dying art of woodblock printing by encouraging artists to incorporate Western aesthetics into traditional ukiyo-e style and themes. The resulting hybrid became known as the Shin Hanga (“New Print”), and, as so cleverly planned by Watanabe, prints of this genre became best sellers in North America and Europe.

Watanabe encouraged Keith to work with wood block cutters to translate her watercolours into prints. By the time she left Japan in 1924, she had published over a hundred prints with him, and put on successful shows in Japan, London and New York.

Lama Temple Peking was printed in 1922. It came to my studio with discoloured and damaged margins, so typical of many Japanese wood block prints. In addition, there was light overall discolouration, a rust stain on the right margin and some localized fading of the red colour.

The challenge with these types of prints is to clean them without disturbing the colour. In this case, the print was floated on a deionized water bath with an EDTA chelating agent. The EDTA helps draw out discolouration, making for quicker and more efficient cleaning, reducing the time that the print is exposed to water. EDTA also binds with metal ion, and so reduces the chance of future metal catalyzed chemical reactions. Float washing allows discolouration to be drawn out from the reverse, without having to immerse the more sensitive front.

The margins were further treated with dilute hydrogen peroxide bleach applied locally with a brush. The print was rinsed by floating on successive deionized water baths, and transferring to a suction table, where the margins were further rinsed.

Losses in the upper right margin were filled with paper inserts cut from Japanese kozo paper, and set in place using methylcellulose adhesive. At the owner’s request, areas where the red colour had faded were lightly toned with watercolour.

One of the many pleasures of conservation is learning about the passions of my different clients. This has introduced me to a wide variety of artists and images that I might otherwise never have discovered, a lovely perk of the profession.