18th c. Chinese wallpaper found at Woburn Abbey

Conservators at Woburn Abbey, the seat of the Dukes of Bedford, have found one of the oldest pieces of Chinese wallpaper in Britain hidden under multiple layers of newer wallpaper. Historic interiors expert Lucy Johnson was researching the decoration of the 4th Duke’s private bedchamber at the behest of the current Duchess of Bedford when she found an invoice from 1752 detailing the purchase of “India” paper, its cost and description. “India” was used as a generic reference to imports from Asia which were brought to England by the East India Company. Johnson also found a reference in the archives to a decorating firm with the excellent name of Crompton and Spinnage having hung India paper in the Duke’s bedroom in 1752.

With the archival evidence pointing to a possible treasure behind the wall coverings in the 4th Duke’s bedchamber, the Woburn Abbey team set about carefully stripping the built up layers in the hope that the first Chinese paper might still be there underneath. Small fragments were found during work in June, but in December they hit the motherlode: a large scene of a male silver pheasant surrounded by pink tree peonies and other flowers and a small bird in the lower left.

The decoration was hand-painted in Canton. The outlines were printed with engraved woodblocks and then colored in by hand with watercolors and gouache. The flora and fauna while native in China would have been exotic novelties in Britain. The fragment is one of the four earliest examples of Chinese wallpaper exported to Europe and it’s the best preserved of the four. Of the three other examples, one had to be extensively restored, once was overpainted and one is very small. The Woburn Abbey piece was covered up only thirty years after it was first hung, so the colors are still bright.

John Russell, the 4th Duke of Bedford, died in 1771. Within a decade or so after his death, his bedroom was converted to a staff room. The elegant Chinese paper was covered with a modest black-and-white block printed distemper paper. A renovation from the 1840s or 50s hung another block printed distemper paper, this one made by machine. The product was inexpensive and indication of the low status of the once-splendid room.

In 1955 Woburn Abbey opened to the public for the first time. The Duke’s former bedroom was converted to the visitor’s entrance and was renamed The Red Souvenir Room. A red embossed flock on pint moiré silk wall covering was installed over the old staff room wallpaper.

It went back to being the 4th Duke’s bedroom in 1977, when a set of 17th century Mortlake tapestries were hung on the walls and the room was redecorated to look like a proper bedroom. It still didn’t look anything like it had when the 4th Duke actually lived there, though.

Now that the all the layers have been exposed, the bedroom is the centerpiece of new exhibition, Peeling Back the Years: Chinese Wallpaper at Woburn Abbey.

The Duke’s private bedroom has been left in its ‘investigative state’ with the various layers of wallpaper on display alongside original documents and items used to make and preserve Chinese wallpaper today.

Visitors can then follow the trail upstairs to the brightly coloured Chinese room with floor to ceiling Chinese wallpaper dating back 1820. […]

Within the house trail a selection of Chinese related artworks reflecting the collecting tastes of the Duke of Bedford chart the progression through the different rooms and periods. Outside in the gardens the second trail links to the depictions in both the 18th and 19th century wallpaper.

Next to the fragment of the original wallpaper in the Duke’s bedroom is a reproduction of how the whole wall would have looked when it was new. The repro was custom-made for the exhibition using traditional methods and materials in China.

The exhibition and garden trails will be open until September 28th.

Madrid begins search for Cervantes’ remains

Researchers in Spain have begun the search for the remains of literary icon Miguel de Cervantes, author of The Adventures of the Ingenious Nobleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Although Don Quixote, today considered the first modern Western novel, was recognized as a pioneering masterpiece as soon as the first volume was published in 1605, its author’s mortal remains rest in an unmarked grave somewhere in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid.

It wasn’t always thus. After his death on April 22nd, 1616, Cervantes was laid to rest in the convent in a properly marked grave. The author left instructions in his will that he be buried in the convent which had been built just four years earlier in 1612. It happened to have been built near his home, but that wasn’t the reason for his selection. Cervantes had a deep bond of gratitude tying him to the Trinitarian order.

In 1571, the 24-year-old Miguel de Cervantes, then traveling in Italy, joined the Spanish army. He was a soldier in the company of Captain Diego Urbina on the galley Marquesa when he fought in one of the seminal battles of European history: the Battle of Lepanto, a naval battle between the Holy League of several European countries and the Ottoman Empire that took place on October 7th, 1571, in the Gulf of Corinth.

According to a contemporary report, Cervantes showed great bravery. He was ill with a fever, but refused to stay below deck. He insisted that he would rather fight and die for king and God rather than be safe and hide. In the course of the battle he was shot three times, twice in the chest and once in his left arm. The latter broke both the radius and ulna and severed a nerve, leaving his left arm almost entirely without movement.

He convalesced for six months and then reupped, fighting in several Mediterranean battles. In September of 1575, his ship, the Sol, was attacked by Algerian pirates and he was taken captive. For five years he was a slave in Algiers. He led four unsuccessful escape attempts before he was finally ransomed in 1580. His family was nearly bankrupted raising the funds to free him and his younger brother Rodrigo, and they wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help of the Trinitarians. The Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of the Captives was founded in the late 12th century with the ransoming of Christians captured during crusades and by non-Christian pirates as one of its pillars.

Cervantes never forgot the service the Trinitarians did him and his family. That’s why he chose to spend eternity in the embrace of the Trinitarian convent. Unfortunately eternity was interrupted in 1673 when the convent was rebuilt and expanded by architect Marcos Lopez. Cervantes’ remains and those of the other dignitaries buried there were removed during construction and reinterred in the new church, only this time the graves weren’t marked.

The city would benefit financially from tourists being able to visit the grave of Spain’s greatest writer, but that’s not its sole motivation in funding a search for his remains.

“Why search for the remains of Miguel de Cervantes? Because he is a figure of worldwide importance. Because all humanity is in his debt. And because we have the opportunity and the technology capable of finding those remains, removing them from an anonymous grave and covering them with a memorial stone,” said Fernando de Pardo, the historian in charge of the project.
“He has given us so much, we are going to try at least to do something by putting his name on a stone to differentiate it from a nameless tomb.”

On Monday, the dozen cloistered nuns who live in the convent separate from all contact with outsiders made way for technicians from Falcon High Tech to begin a sweep of the foundations and walls with ground-penetrating radar and infrared scans. A previous GPR sweep in 2011 bore no fruit. The hope is that this time new magnetic impulse technology will penetrate further and provide more detailed results illuminating the location of grave cavities within the structure.

At least 15 people are known to have been buried in the convent, two of them close to Cervantes, so even if remains are discovered there’s no guarantee they’ll be those of the author, or that it will even be possible to pick out his from a potential bone jumble. His war wounds and dental damage will be instrumental to identification. The shots from an arquebus (a muzzle-loaded, smoothbore longarm firearm that was a precursor to the musket and rifle) can’t help but have left evidence of their presence in his chest and left arm.

As for his unfortunate teeth, we have his own words to go by. Here’s how the author describes himself in the author’s preface of Exemplary Novels:

an oval visage, chestnut hair, smooth open forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but well-proportioned nose, and silvery beard that twenty years ago was golden, large moustaches, a small mouth, teeth not much to speak of, for he has but six, in bad condition and worse placed, no two of them corresponding to each other, a figure midway between the two extremes, neither tall nor short, a vivid complexion, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very lightfooted….

There are no confirmed portraits of Cervantes from life. Cervantes mentions a portrait of him by Juan de Jauregui y Aguilar in the Exemplary Novels and there is a painting that claims to be of Cervantes that was attributed to Jauregui in the past, but modern scholarship doesn’t accept the attribution. Some people think this El Greco portrait from ca. 1605 may be of Cervantes, but the only evidence is that he was in Toledo around the time the portrait was painted and had friends in common with El Greco.

Researchers hope that if they do find the remains, they might be able to do a facial reconstruction to give us our first confirmed portrait of Miguel de Cervantes.

There are several obstacles to overcome before they get to that point, however. First, they have to find viable results from the radar sweep. After three weeks of careful analysis, those results will be presented to Madrid’s city hall where they will decide whether there is enough evidence to break ground on an archaeological excavation. They have the permission of the Trinitarians to proceed with excavations should it get to that point.

If researchers do get extra lucky and manage to find the remains of Cervantes, after analysis they will be reinterred in the convent as per her final wishes. This time, however, there’s going to be a monument involved, or at least a plaque.

Picasso curtain at Four Seasons restaurant in danger

A 19-by-20-foot stage curtain painted by Pablo Picasso in 1919 that now hangs in the Four Seasons Restaurant (no relation to the hotel) is in danger. RFR Holding, owners of the historic Seagram Building since 2000, want to take the painting down, ostensibly because the travertine wall it hangs on has suffered structural damage, but only their engineers think the wall is structurally unsound and removing the fragile curtain is far more likely to damage it than errant stone facing becoming unmoored and tearing through the fabric.

The Picasso curtain was a front cloth for a production of Le Tricorne by the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev which premiered on July 22nd, 1919, at London’s Alhambra Theatre. Based on a novella by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and with music by Manuel de Falla, the ballet tells the story of a miller and his wife who get playful revenge on the lecherous governor who hit on the wife and tried to have the miller arrested. Falla had written El corregidor y la molinera, a two-scene pantomime of the novella, during World War I. It was a popular and critical success. Diaghilev and Ballets Russes dancer/choreographer Léonide Massine saw the show in Madrid in May of 1917 and felt it could be developed into a full-length Spanish ballet.

The Ballets Russes began their second season of performances in Spain in June. During the season, Falla took Massine and Diaghilev to see the best flamenco dancers in the city. That summer most of the troupe toured South America while Massine and Diaghilev traveled around Spain, absorbing the music and dance and working together on Le Tricorne. Pablo Picasso, who had already collaborated with the Ballets Russes on the ballet Parade, music by Erik Satie, scenario by Jean Cocteau, in 1916-7, worked with them on the Spanish ballet. One of the Ballets Russes dancers, Olga Khokhlova, quit before the troupe went to South America and traveled to Barcelona with Picasso. Within a year Picasso and Khokhlova would be married.

During their time in Spain, Léonide Massine hired Félix Fernández García, a flamenco dancer from Seville, to teach him the footwork. Fernández García expected to dance the lead in the production and indeed traveled with the troupe to London, but he found out from the advertising posters that Massine would be dancing the part of the Miller. His reaction to the bad news was to start carrying a ticking metronome with him everywhere he went. When one night he was found dancing naked on the altar of the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, Fernández García was committed to Long Grove Hospital for insanity. He would remain institutionalized at Long Grove until his death in 1941. In a creepy twist, after his institutionalization Diaghilev had García declared dead in Spain in 1919.

Picasso joined the troupe in London to finish his work on the sets and costumes. He made the drop curtain in a paint studio on Floral Street, Covent Garden, over the course of three weeks. The curtain hung in front of the stage during the overture the first major number after which it was raised to reveal the set pieces. In keeping with the ballet’s focus on Spanish culture, Picasso chose to depict a scene at a bullfighting ring even though there is no bullfight in the story.

Diaghilev kept the curtain after the show was over. Less than a decade later in 1928. he cut off the marbleized paper edges and sold the painted center to Swiss collector G. F. Reber. In 1957 it was purchased for $50,000 by Phyllis Lambert, daughter of Seagram owner Samuel Bronfman. When her father asked to help decorate the Seagram Building, she and architect Philip Johnson chose the dramatic Le Tricorne for what would become known as Picasso Alley, the hallway connecting the Four Seasons’ two dining rooms, the pool room and the grill room.

In 2005, the painting was donated to the New York Landmarks Conservancy by Vivendi Universal, then owners of the Seagram company, on the condition that the curtain remain in situ at the Four Seasons. The Seagram Building and the Four Seasons restaurant were given landmark status in 1989, but because in theory the Picasso curtain is moveable, it isn’t covered by landmark protections. This became an acute problem in November of 2013 when the Landmarks Conservancy got a call from Aby Rosen, co-founder of RFR, claiming there was a steam leak in the wall and they’d have to take down the painting to repair it. When asked for the engineer’s report, Rosen replied there was none.

Next the Landmarks Conservancy received a letter from RFR on December 20th telling them work on the wall would begin the first week in January. This time there was an engineer’s report — no mention of a steam leak, just of the tiles moving a half-inch indicating structural issues — but when the LC sent their experts to assess the soundness of the wall, their findings were significantly different. Although they also found some tiles had moved, the amount of the movement was much less and fewer tiles were affected.

Finally a plan was in place to take down the curtain at 3:00 AM on February 9th so as not to disturb diners at the Four Seasons. The Conservancy rushed to court to get a temporary restraining order blocking the move which according to RFR’s lawyer involved rolling the fragile canvas up “one click at a time” and putting it in a rented van. Even the art mover admitted the curtain might “crack like a potato chip” in the process. Less than two days before the planned move, the court issued the restraining order.

The owners of the Seagram Building stunned the judge by arguing they can just replace the famed artist’s work if anything happened to it.

“If we break it, we buy it,” lawyer Andrew Kratenstein told Justice Matthew Cooper’s clerk outside the courtroom.

There aren’t enough eyes to roll over that one. The curtain is obviously not replaceable being a unique work by a dead master. That they would even attempt such an argument underscores that they really don’t care what happens to the painting. Rosen was heard referring to the curtain as a “schmatte,” meaning “rag” in Yiddish. The engineering claims are barely believable, so what seems to be going on here is that Rosen wants to put some of the art he likes — he’s an avid collector of works by artists like Jeff Coons and Damien Hirst — in the space currently occupied by the largest Picasso in the country.

The restraining order is still in place, having been extended several times. The Conservancy has asked for an injunction preventing the removal of the curtain. The court will hear arguments from experts on April 30th and May 1st, after which Judge Carol Edmead will rule on the request. They’re buying time, basically. The larger legal question of whether the Conservancy can stop the owners of the building from doing whatever they want to their property is a thornier problem.

Wreck of City of Chester found in San Francisco Bay

The wreck of the City of Chester, a steamship that sank with much loss of life in August 22, 1888, has been rediscovered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The ship was found in May of last year during a sonar survey of another shipwreck. The Office of Coast Survey Navigational Response Team 6 was scanning the wreck of the Fernstream, a freighter that went down in 1952. While they were in the neighborhood, NOAA director of maritime heritage James Delgado asked the team to look for the City of Chester.

After working with historic data provided by NOAA historians, the Coast Survey team conducted a multi-beam sonar survey and a sonar target the right size and shape was found. The team spent nearly nine months sorting through the data. A follow-up side-scan sonar survey confirmed that the target was City of Chester, sitting upright, shrouded in mud, 216 feet deep at the edge of a small undersea shoal. High-resolution sonar imagery clearly defined the hull, rising some 18 feet from the seabed, and the fatal gash on the vessel’s port side.

The wreck won’t be salvaged or interfered with in any way –it’s a protected grave site owned by the state of California — but its rediscovery will be a central feature of an upcoming exhibition at the historic Coast Guard Station on Crissy Field, on the northeast shore of the Presidio.

The story of the City of Chester provides a glimpse into a fraught period in US, particularly California, history. Headed for Eureka, California, the steamship hit a fog bank on its way out of San Francisco Bay. It slowed down and sounded the whistle at regular intervals to alert any other ships in the area and soon received a whistle response from another ship, the Oceanic, a steamship twice Chester‘s size. According to news accounts of the shipwreck, Oceanic sent a double whistle signal, indicating the ships should pass each other on the starboard side, and the Chester acknowledged with a double whistle reply. However, the Chester, either because the signals were misunderstood or because the tides drove it off-course, made for the port side of Oceanic.

They were already just half a mile apart when they became aware of each other’s presence; there was no time to avoid disaster. Oceanic plowed into the smaller ship, impaling it on its bow. The impact knocked some passengers directly into the water. Others were pulled up onto the Oceanic from the Chester deck. A few people were able to make it onto boats launched by the Chester in the six minutes it was still above the water after the collision. Oceanic sent down rescue boats of its own and threw life preservers to the survivors struggling in the cold, rough waters of the bay. Out of the 106 passengers and crew on the Chester manifest, 16 died, two of them small children.

It was the worst loss of life in the San Francisco Bay until 1901 when the City of Rio de Janeiro hit a reef and 128 people were lost. Because the Oceanic was coming from Japan and had some Asian crew (judging from the names, the officers were all Anglo) and because the question of Chinese immigration was on fire in the 1880s, there was some ugly racial commentary in the wake of the tragedy. John Walker, an able seaman (that’s a position, not a value judgment) on the Chester who was the first to emerge on the wharf after his rescue, told reporters:

“On the Oceanic the Chinese crew seemingly became terror-stricken as soon as the accident occurred, and much time was lost in the lowering boats of the latter steamer. If the crew had been white, there would have been more lives saved. Finally the boats of the Oceanic were lowered and did good work picking up those who were floating in the bay, sustaining themselves on life-preservers and bits of wreckage.”

That wasn’t necessarily the dominant narrative, however. Several articles credit the courage of a Chinese passenger on the Oceanic who rescued a little girl from the waves and held her, sitting astride a capsized lifeboat, until help came. Here’s a particularly telling account in the Sacramento Daily Record-Union of August 24, 1888:

A GALLANT CHINAMAN.

How a Mongolian Sailor Rescued a Baby from a Watery Grave

The conduct of Ah Lun, the Chinese sailor spoken of by Captain Metcalf as the rescuer of a little baby, is described by those who saw the incident as courageous in the extreme. Ah Lun was in a boat with three other Mongolians, and among the debris he discovered the head of a child. Throwing down his oar, he dived in after the little one, and then, after swimming for some distance, succeeded in reaching her. A few strokes brought him to the boat, which had been capsized in the whirlpool formed by the sinking steamer, and, climbing on the keel, he placed the child in such a position that the salt water was forced out of her mouth.

A few moments afterward he was taken off and brought on deck, where a mother was waiting to claim the little one. It was then discovered that Ah Lun had sustained many bruises and lacerations, his legs and arms being cut and scratched severely.

Deputy Surveyor Fogarty was specially delighted with the conduct of the Chinaman, who it appears, is an old acquaintance of his. When the urbane Deputy reached the deck the Chinaman accosted him, and after receiving his congratulations asked if he did not think he ought to be allowed to go on shore, though he was not a certificated man. Fogarty assured him that if it was in his power to let him, he would be made an American citizen without delay.

“If ever a Mongolian deserved to be habeased corpused,” said Mr. Forgarty to a Call reporter, “I think Ah Lun is the man.”

Ah Lun not being a “certificated man” who nonetheless deserves to be “habeased corpused” is a reference the legal chaos that followed the United States’ first law blocking one particular ethnic group from immigration: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act prohibited Chinese laborers, skilled and unskilled, and miners from entering the country for 10 years. Only a few categories of professionals like merchants were allowed entry, and they had to secure a “section 6 certificate” from the Chinese government attesting to their occupation. Chinese immigrants who already lived in the United States were prohibited entry to the US without an identity document known as a return certificate. It also excluded Chinese immigrants from applying for US citizenship.

In practice, enforcing this law was a monster problem for the courts. The Act contradicted the terms of an 1880 treaty between China and the United States, and there were thousands of people who fell through the cracks of the return certificate system. If they were out of the country, traveling back home to see family, perhaps, when the law was passed, then obviously there was no way for them to have secured the return certificate or the section 6 certificate before it was invented.

With anti-Chinese sentiment so thoroughly entrenched in San Francisco politics, the collector of the port, the political appointee responsible for enforcing the Exclusion Act, denied entry to anyone lacking the certificates, even if securing them was a complete impossibility short of inventing a time machine. When they were refused entry into San Francisco, the Chinese filed writs of habeas corpus in federal court on the grounds that they were being illegally detained on their ships.

So that’s what Ah Lun was talking about when he asked Fogarty if he could be allowed on shore despite not being a “certificated man,” and when Fogarty said he deserved to be “habeased corpused,” or released from confinement aboard ship so he could return to his San Francisco home. As the deputy surveyor, Fogarty would have had some involvement in these court cases. The surveyor and deputy surveyor were part of the U.S. Attorney’s team in at least one very high-profile habeas corpus writ which eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was ultimately decided in favor of the petitioner, Chew Heong, on treaty grounds and because he had left the country in 1881, before the Act was passed. The decision also confirmed the citizenship of anyone born in the United States, including the children of Chinese immigrants.

Even as more amendments were tacked on to the Exclusion Act to make it ever more exclusionary, the habeas corpus petitions kept coming, so much so that they clogged the docket of federal judges and ground the system to a near-halt. By the end of the decade, more than 7,000 habeas corpus writs had been filed in the California district court alone.

In 1888, the Chinese government, sick of the treaty violations and horrified by violence against Chinese immigrant communities like the 1885 Rock Springs massacre in which 28 Chinese miners were killed and hundreds forced to flee for their lives by a mob of 150 white miners and railroad workers, negotiated a new treaty with the US. The Bayard-Zhang Treaty of March, 1888, prohibited immigration or return of Chinese laborers for 20 years. The only exceptions were for people who had assets of at least $1,000 or immediate family living in the US.

The treaty was not well-received in China, and the government began to back away from ratification unless the chains were loosened a little bit. Meanwhile, it still wasn’t draconian enough for the Americans, so in October of 1888, Congress passed the Scott Act, a supplement to the Exclusion Act that locked the door tight.

Terms of Scott Act:

SEC. 1. It shall be unlawful for any chinese laborer who shall at any time heretofore have been, or who may now or hereafter be, a resident within the United States, and who shall have departed, or shall depart, therefrom, and shall not have returned before the passage of this act, to return to, or remain in, the United States.

SEC. 2. That no certificates of identity . . . shall hereafter be issued; and every certificate heretofore issued in pursuance thereof, is hereby declared void and of no effect, and the chinese laborer claiming admission by virtue thereof shall not be permitted to enter the United States.

When the Scott Act came before the Supreme Court the next year, the decision went entirely the opposite way from the 1884 case. It was unanimously upheld. Chinese Exclusion continued to be the law of the land, with regular amendments over the years, until World War II.

200-year-old douche and friends find new home

The 200-year-old vaginal syringe discovered underneath the historic landmark New York City Hall in lower Manhattan will find a permanent home under the same roof as thousands of other artifacts discovered during the constant churn of New York’s soil over the course of decades. Until now, artifacts discovered at excavations, usually surveys in advance of construction, have been spread out to 13 different institutions across the city, including Barnard College and Columbia University. Now the Landmarks Preservation Commission has created the New York City Archaeological Repository, a 1,400-square-foot, climate-controlled space at 114 W. 47th St., to host the artifacts in conservation conditions.

The last single location in New York to host the city’s archaeological patrimony was New York Unearthed, a privately-funded museum that closed in 2005. The museum was created by property owners the William Kaufman Organization as part a deal with the city. They would get to build on land known to be replete with rare archaeological artifacts from the earliest days of New Amsterdam without having to submit to an Environmental Quality Review. In return, they would fund a history museum on the first floor. The next owners honored the agreement, but when they sold the building in 1999, the new owners wanted nothing to do with the museum. They let it stay in place without paying rent or utilities, but they refused any further funding.

After the museum folded in 2005, the massive collection of two million artifacts that were once on display in the 1,400 square foot space were rescued by the New York State Museum in Albany. A few pieces are on display there, but almost the entire collection is in storage in steel cabinets.

It seems like for now at least, the new repository will be much the same: a place to store, catalog and study. It’s not a museum and will not be open to the public. Scholars and museums will be allowed to examine pieces upon request. Archaeologists are glad to get the opportunity to do their research in one location and to be able to do comparative analysis of related artifacts. It won’t be complete without the Albany collection, however, so I hope there are some long-term plans afoot to reunite all of New York’s material culture.

The property for the repository was donated by the Durst Organization, a big real estate company that is still family run and which boasts a strong complement of history nerds in the family. The land was donated in honor of Nan Rothschild, a member of the Durst family and an anthropology professor at Barnard. An earlier Durst, Mr. Seymour B. Durst, built up a collection of New Yorkiana — historic photographs, postcards, maps, newspapers, assorted memorabilia — so vast that by the time he died in 1995, it filled all five floors of his townhouse. The Durst family donated the collection and funds to conserve it to the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, where it is now known as the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library Collection. The Durst Organization is also funding a massive digitization project. When it’s complete, the entire collection will be made available online for scholars and the general public.

I can’t help but hope that Durst attitude will rub off on the repository plan, expanding it so that millions of New York City artifacts will be all together again and on display for the public to enjoy.