Island conservator restores artwork
Tasia Bulger is working on ‘A Meeting of the School Trustees’
People who have seen the old Heritage Minutes commercials on TV may be familiar with the painting “A Meeting of the School Trustees.”
Painted by Island artist Robert Harris in 1885, the piece shows a meeting in a schoolhouse in P.E.I. It is currently being restored by a young woman with as strong an island connection as the painting itself.
Tasia Bulger is from North Wiltshire and is working on restoring the painting for display in the National Gallery in Ottawa.
Bulger was given the job of restoring this piece because of familiarity with the artist. “I had restored one of his other paintings already,” she explains, “so I already knew his style.”
She describes the painting as depicting a “confrontational meeting,” with “a woman standing up to a group of men.” She says it is very contemporary of the era.
The painting has been untouched for decades, unrestored in any way since the 1920s. “The canvas was torn in five places some time around the 1923,” Bulger says, “It got restored by a man in San Francisco. From then on, it really didn’t get any treatment.”
Part of Bulger’s job was to undo the work from the 1920s, and restore it using modern methods. “A lot of what we do in restorations is reversing older treatments,” Bulger explained, continuing, “It’s kind of neat to get to work on something that hasn’t been worked on in almost a hundred years.”
There was also a discovery made during the work. A chalkboard in the lower left corner of the painting had always been thought to be blank. After removing some darkened varnish, Bulger discovered the words “-ool trustees,” “meeting,” and “Day next.”
“It’s always fun to find out something that we didn’t really know was there through treatment,” Bulger says.
The painting has some notable history directly related to the National Gallery. “[Harris] wanted to paint something that would have interest for us to buy,” Bulger says. “He got lucky. It ended up being one of the first purchases that the National Gallery made.”