As I get ready for another busy summer of maintaining the outdoor sculptures here at the IMA, I thought I would share some information about some work I completed last summer with the fine help of intern Cydney Campbell (she is also an undergrad at Herron and a world-renown Irish dancer – here’s a picture of her in mid dance).
During the muggiest weeks of August we completed a pretty major treatment on one of the more important sculptures on the Oldfields estate, the Three Graces. Consisting of a solid piece of carved white marble perched on a limestone base, the sculpture had become pretty dirty over recent years. Here’s how it look before we got started:
Side note #1, though we have a good idea of when and why the sculpture was placed in this important location of Percival Gallagher’s landscape design we don’t have a clear sense of who actually made it. (Side note #2, I desperately wanted to put a link to Gallagher’s Wikipedia article, but sadly one doesn’t exist. There is some info on him in the book Pioneers of American Landscape Design, published by LALH)
