

Find out more about our future & past events here
Find out more about our future & past events here
Upcoming Events
Save the date!
TPF’s Annual Conference will be Friday 14th of March, 2025
Please also consider joining the Traditional Paint Forum – information on Membership is available on our website.
The annual conference of the Traditional Paint Forum is a great way of staying in touch with fellow professionals and keeping up to date with the latest research in the field.
Please follow us on Twitter for forthcoming events.
You can also explore the archive of our past conferences here.
Past Events
This in-person event took place at the historic St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate on Fri 22nd March 2024 at 09:30 GMT.
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Join us for vibrant and colourful discussion covering a wide range of traditional paint topics:
St Botolph’s Without Bishopsgate is the Guild Church of the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers. Tom Saunders, who combines specialist painting and decoration with fan making will be giving a short introductory talk about this ancient craft.
Stewart Wright and Sophie Stewart will discuss the 80 properties with wall paintings in English Heritage’s care, with an overview on the Condition Audit of every painting and prioritisation of their conservation requirements. The talk will focus on rare surviving early 12th Century wall-paintings from St Mary’s Church, Kempley, Gloucestershire, which are the most complete set of Romanesque paintings in northern Europe
Mackenzie Higgins and Karen Morrissey ACR of Hirst Conservation will detail the complex challenges of conserving oil paintings on corroded zinc panels. The panels, which are early works of Sir Ninian Comper, are situated in a medieval stone reredos of St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Geddington, Northamptonshire. The presentation will provide in-depth information on the treatments and the background surrounding each treatment decision.
After lunch, talks by Ruth McNeilage will relate the conservaton of East Harptree Wall paintings, and Mary Lewis will discuss heritage skills and crafts at risk of being lost. Helen Hughes ACR will reveal her research on the forger George Shaw- in1847 Shaw was finally caught out! The Percy arms on the two ‘ancient cupboards’ he was trying to sell to the incredulous Duke of Northumberland was wrong. It was obvious the new wood had been patinated with soot and a coat of dirty varnish. But Shaw seem to have painted the backs with expensive ultramarine. Why?
We will be hosting exhibitions from Wallace Seymour Fine Art Materials, Mike Dobby XRF analysis and Rose of Jericho paints.
As ever, the TPF conference is a chance to connect with fellow paint enthusiasts. Following the AGM at 17:00, there will be a drinks and nibbles evening, a great opportunity to keep the conversation going!
This in-person event will take place at the historic St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate on Fri 22nd March 2024 at 09:30 GMT.
Join us for vibrant and colourful discussion covering a wide range of traditional paint topics:
St Botolph’s Without Bishopsgate is the Guild Church of the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers. Tom Saunders, who combines specialist painting and decoration with fan making will be giving a short introductory talk about this ancient craft.
Stewart Wright and Sophie Stewart will discuss the 80 properties with wall paintings in English Heritage’s care, with an overview on the Condition Audit of every painting and prioritisation of their conservation requirements. The talk will focus on rare surviving early 12th Century wall-paintings from St Mary’s Church, Kempley, Gloucestershire, which are the most complete set of Romanesque paintings in northern Europe
Mackenzie Higgins and Karen Morrissey ACR of Hirst Conservation will detail the complex challenges of conserving oil paintings on corroded zinc panels. The panels, which are early works of Sir Ninian Comper, are situated in a medieval stone reredos of St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Geddington, Northamptonshire. The presentation will provide in-depth information on the treatments and the background surrounding each treatment decision.
After lunch, talks by Ruth McNeilage will relate the conservaton of East Harptree Wall paintings, and Mary Lewis will discuss heritage skills and crafts at risk of being lost. Helen Hughes ACR will reveal her research on the forger George Shaw- in1847 Shaw was finally caught out! The Percy arms on the two ‘ancient cupboards’ he was trying to sell to the incredulous Duke of Northumberland was wrong. It was obvious the new wood had been patinated with soot and a coat of dirty varnish. But Shaw seem to have painted the backs with expensive ultramarine. Why?
We will be hosting exhibitions from Wallace Seymour Fine Art Materials, Mike Dobby XRF analysis and Rose of Jericho paints.
As ever, the TPF conference is a chance to connect with fellow paint enthusiasts. Following the AGM at 17:00, there will be a drinks and nibbles evening, a great opportunity to keep the conversation going!
Date: Thursday 6th May 2021 starting from 7pm
Speaker: Polly Westlake and Ana Logreira (Cliveden Conservation)
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All Saints Church, Fleet, is a Grade II listed building by the renowned Victorian architect William Burgess. It was built in 1861-2. In 2015 the church was badly damaged by a vast fire.
One effect of the fire was to partially uncover the original painted scheme in the Chancel, that had been white washed over in the early 20th century.
The paint layers revealed below layers of limewash and modern emulsion were in an extremely deteriorated condition. Certain pigments had fused with the overlying paint due to extremes of heat. As the modern layers flaked away from the substrate they were peeling the original away, sometimes leaving the composition exposed ‘in the negative’ as only the ground layers survive. In other areas the original scheme was preserved in surprisingly good condition, below layers of powdering modern paint which served to buffer the scheme against the fire and subsequent weathering.
Cliveden Conservation undertook a condition assessment and treatment trials (June 2018) focussing on how to stabilise the extremely fragile painting sufficiently to withstand the application – and possible later removal – of a temporary protective covering layer. In 2019 the conservators returned to carry out the consolidation and protection of the decorated surfaces, a provisional treatment until works are undertaken to restore the rest of the church.
Research was carried out to identify now illegible iconographic elements, such as the roundels located on the arch, through comparisons of other schemes by William Burges. In addition, research was undertaken into particular motifs used by the Architect, in a selection of unrealised plans and drawings in the V&A archive. Digital reconstructions were made from the surviving compositional elements at All Saints. This work serves as an important record of how the church was originally decorated, as well as of the style and schemes of Burges. If future church users decide to recreate the original scheme – the preference currently is to restore the undecorated white finish – this work will be essential to the accurate reconstruction of the scheme.
The question arose of what to do with the painting once the functionality of the religious building has been recovered; Keep the paintings covered? Conserve fully and leave them visible? Leave them partially exposed? Cover for protection and reproduce the decorative design above? The discussion and possibilities of these questions are the central axis of this paper and are related to technical, theoretical, ethical and aesthetical aspects.
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Donations to be made for the Art Foundation
https://www.artfund.org/get-involved/art-happens/join-together-for-museums
PAINTED FURNITURE AT THE V&A: From William Morris To The Omega Workshops
Date: Thursday, February 20th 2020 at 1830
Venue: Donald Insall Associates, 12 Devonshire Street, London WIG 7AB
Drawing on the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Max Donnelly will discuss the role of painted decoration in furniture from the 1850s to the early twentieth century. Beginning with furniture designed by William Burges he will go on to consider furniture painted by William Morris and his circle, ‘Art’ furniture, and finally objects decorated by Arts and Crafts practitioners and by members of the Omega Workshops.
Max Donnelly
Max Donnelly is Curator of Nineteenth-Century Furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he is a member of the Curatorial Concept Team planning new international nineteenth-century galleries. Recent publications include a chapter on furniture for the monograph, C.F.A. Voysey: Arts and Crafts Designer (V&A Publishing, 2016). He is a trustee of the Emery Walker Trust and the Decorative Arts Society.
Thursday 27th September 2018 @ Donald Insall Associates
This is a discussion for everyone involved in Architectural Paint Research; practitioners, local authorities, heritage bodies, conservation architects, and private clients.
The discipline is now an accepted part of the planning process, but it is beset by problems; a lack of agreed standards, little training for practitioners, misunderstanding of the discipline by planning officers, imprecise briefs. How do we improve matters?’
Thursday 22nd March 2018 @ Donald Insall Associates
We had a fascinating evening lecture by Patrick Baty on 22 March. Patrick explained why several people have referred to him as ‘The Paint Detective’.
Amongst notable examples, Patrick spoke of a house, with discreet Royal connections, where he could prove that a pair of doors had come from a long-demolished building, hundreds of miles away.
He also provided an update on work at Stowe and described the finding of a hidden mural in the Chelsea house owned by the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
Friday 26th May 2017
Traditional Paint Forum provides a discussion and information platform but does not promote or endorse any individual company, product or process.
Thursday 23rd March 2017 @ Donald Insall Associates London office
Thursday 11th August 2016 @ Donald Insall Associates London office
Traditional Paint Forum provides a discussion and information platform but does not promote or endorse any individual company, product or process.