The approach and method of the pre-1979 practice of restoration meant removing the weak and damaged original silk and wool and replacing it with new yarns, woven to replicate the original.  This caused permanent loss of the fine original detail and materials and was a slow and costly process.  The original design would be lost and the re-woven areas were often of a lesser quality and not consistent with the original so contemporary treatment methods were developed to try to keep pace with the deterioration of the textiles in the palace.
 
The resulting practise of conservation was officially put into place in the early 1980s.  The approach aims to retain the evidence of original detail as much as possible and to focus on chemical and physical stabilisation of what remains.
When a tapestry is conserved, the weak and damaged areas are retained and supported using modern support fabrics and stitching techniques.

Today the Tapestry Workroom is part of Historic Royal Palaces’ Conservation and Collection Care section with over 30 members of staff who continue to improve and develop conservation methods to provide the best care for the textiles, objects and decorative features in all of out five historic royal palaces and preserve them for future generations.

The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek is one of a set of tapestries called ‘The History of Abraham’. It was woven in the 16th century and by the 20th century had deteriorated significantly. Much of the original wool and silk had been lost and the tapestry was extremely weak; too weak to hang on the wall. It was conserved in the workrooms at Hampton Court Palace over a period of ten years; here are two examples of the challenges the conservators faced.

Couching the urn

This urn was originally woven in lots of bright and shiny silk thread. Unfortunately over the last 450 years much of this has degraded and crumbled away revealing the bare warps beneath, a problem found throughout the tapestry. Years of exposure to daylight, dirt and dust have caused the fragile fibres of the silk and wool to break down. In the past an area like this would have been cut away and re-woven with new wool and silk (restoration). What you see here is the original woven urn supported by a linen fabric using a conservation stitch method known as ‘couching’. This means that the original warps have been stitched onto the linen and by using a suitably coloured new silk thread together with the same coloured polyester for extra strength, the urn looks whole again and from a viewing distance the silk gives an indication of the sheen it would have once had.

Patching a hole

This was a large hole, measuring about 30 x 20cm, located in the sky just to the right of the centre. It had been patched with another piece of tapestry of a very poor colour match which made it look very obvious and unsightly. The decision was taken to remove the patch and replace it with something more suitable. But what?
Textile conservators at Hampton Court had to take into account time, money and aesthetics. An obvious choice would have been to have a new fragment woven, but this would be very costly and we would have had to wait a long time for it.

So we decided to create our own patch.

The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek is a tapestry of the highest quality with a weaving effect that looks very much like a painting. This is created through a complex blending of many colours. You can see that the sky is not just a flat area of colour but contains many subtle variations.
So it was concluded that a new patch would be created by applying fabric paint to a piece of wool with a warp count that matched the fine weave structure of the tapestry.
Once a suitable colour palette was established, paint was applied to the patch by slowly building up thin layers of colour. It was extremely important that we did not create a thick, encrusted paint surface.
To complete the top of the dome a thin, brown line was painted in a low arch with some light shadowing underneath to suggest a solid structure.
The tapestry is now hanging in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, next time you’re there take a look and see if you can spot our patch.

Before the tapestry was conserved it was washed in our purpose built wash bath. Click here to see how this is done.