Bonnardot’s Essai: A Nineteenth-Century Restoration Manual and Its Author

Abstract

This paper evaluates the influence of a nineteenth-century French manual on the restoration of prints, drawings, and books to contemporary conservation philosophy and practice. First published in 1846, Essai sur la restauration des anciennes estampes et des livres rares was researched and written by Alfred Bonnardot (1808-1884) a writer, bibliophile, and historian of Paris. His manual, offering fellow amateurs of prints and books a nuanced range of clearly-described restoration procedures, found a growing audience that encouraged the issue of an enlarged second edition in 1858. At 349 pages, this second edition of the Essai remains the most comprehensive and detailed text on paper restoration of the nineteenth century in a western European language. The manual was translated into a German edition in 1859, and has since been reissued in French facsimile editions in 1967 and 1979. It is now available to anyone through Google Books on the Web. A published translation of the full text in English has not yet appeared. When compared to other restoration literature of the nineteenth century, Bonnardot’s Essai stands apart in two significant ways. The first distinction is Bonnardot’s insistence upon procedures founded by original scientific investigation. Bonnardot assures the reader that his techniques are informed by training in chemistry from illustrious teachers and refined through years of experimentation and testing. The second distinction—and perhaps his most lasting contribution to conservation—is his emphasis on a cautious “less-is-better” treatment philosophy. If the willing reader heeded the advice in the Essai, writes Bonnardot, then he would have a preferable alternative to the destructive activity of the restorers of the day. Because Bonnardot’s novel insistence upon studied procedures exercised with caution has become the standard approach of our own time, his Essai is an ideal text by which to measure any real evolution in our own field since the mid-nineteenth century. Using the ample evidence supplied within the chapters of the Essai, such as Bonnardot’s habit of pondering about the historical importance of an oily stain before deciding to lessen it, the paper argues that professional conservation of today continues to uphold the standards set by this French amateur restorer 150 years ago. In summary, critical examination of Bonnardot’s watershed Essai and its legacy has been light, sporadic, and long overdue. One explanation for his obscurity is that present-day conservation remains in the midst of researching and writing its own history and has not yet arrived at his door. Bonnardot himself wrote in 1846 that his manual “would be remembered only for clearing a path” and that soon a chemist would reveal his work as a crude primer. Little could he anticipate that his Essai would remain the most sophisticated textbook on the philosophy and procedures of print and book restoration until the modern era of restoration literature began to appear in the 1930s (Plenderleith and Schweidler). Nonetheless, as a historical touchstone for Western paper conservation, it remains curiously unknown outside of francophone Europe.