August 2015
you plan every single move out in your head,” she told the website Fauquier Now in 2013. “You always know exactly what you’re doing. There are no shortcuts. Every step has to be perfect. If it’s not, your next step will be off.” Her initial goal was get the painting back in the courtroom by July 4, 2013, and she beat her personal deadline by two days. “It’s great on a lot of levels,” she told the website, which reported that the restoration cost about $20,000. “It’s a great painting, because it’s monumental. It’s a great man. It makes me feel a part of (the community). Every time I drive or walk by the courthouse, I’ll know a part of me is there.” And part of her also involves giving back. In 2001, she helped her mother move out of her family home in Washington where she’d lived for more than 50 years. During that process, Judith came upon all manner of family treasures—old photos, paintings, knick-knacks that “even as a professional, I didn’t know how to value, protect or display.” And so, she started a web-site, Art-Care.com, an on-line resource that connects owners of art, antiques and other objects with experienced, licensed and credentialed service suppliers—conservators, restorers, art shippers, specialized attorneys, gilders and many more. Now more than 350 providers are listed on the site, all accessible with a few key strokes. For Judith Watkins Tartt, the non-profit site, supported by modest membership dues from the listed professionals, has also become a proud labor of love in a lifetime of creating great art in her own inimitable, restorative, do-no-harm style. She was a little girl with poor vision who truly became a visionary, internationally acclaimed artist in her own right, saving both masterpieces as well as cherished family possessions every step of the way. n
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the National Sporting Gallery in Middleburg and the Charles Cowles Gallery in New York. She’s been awarded contracts from the General Services Administration, State Department, U.S. Treasury, House of Representatives and the National Air and Space Museum. In addition to working on paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso, among her many restoration credits include works by Claude Monet, George Stubbs, Sir Alfred Munnings, J.F. Herring, George Braque, Gilbert Stuart and Man Ray. And did we mention her fabulous work at the Fauquier County Courthouse? Two years ago, the 5x9 foot portrait of Chief Justice John Marshall painted in 1859 by Clarke County13 native William D. Washington, disappeared from its longtime perch behind the bench of the Fauquier County General District Courtroom and was transported to Tartt’s studio. It had been in the courtroom save for a brief interlude when the painting travelled to Cincinnati for safekeeping during the Civil War and then again for a short time when rescued from a courthouse fire in 1889. Originally purchased by the county for $500, the painting was in dire need of a significant restoration. The final blow literally came when a court bailiff playfully threw his keys at a colleague and missed his target. The keys hit the painting, tearing a small hole in the canvas. Enter Judith Watkins Tartt. Over three months, she undertook a 14-step process of painstaking work, all done in her studio. Fixing the tear made by the errant key may have been the very least of her challenges in a process that cleaned the front and back, removed weave irregularities and even included added new hanging hardware and putting a non-acidic backing board to add support. “It’s like choreography, because
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a conservator in Asia for Sotheby’s. In 1994, she restored a mural of The Three Graces in that city’s Mandarin Hotel, one of her proudest accomplishments. “Their golden figures had been covered in brown paint,” she recalled, “When it was removed, the owners believed that good luck returned to their tourist trade.” Another major project involved restoring priceless art at the Turkish embassy in Washington, now the residence of the Turkish ambassador. Two immense paintings alongside the entrance staircase were so faded, their color was actually invisible. By the time Tartt had cleaned them, she discovered they were works of Renaissance painter Allesandro Allori, signed and dated 1575. For many years, she also worked out of her own studios in the District while occasionally coming out to Hunt Country to pursue another passion—riding horses. In 2007, she and her husband, Jo, who owned the Tartt gallery in the District for many years, decided to leave Washington behind and purchase their farm. Her list of credits is immense. One of her favorite clients was world-famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who also was musical director and conductor of the National Symphony from 197794. One day, he called and said he had 50 paintings earmarked for his dacha in Russia that needed some help before they could be displayed. He wanted them almost immediately, and in addition to her fee, he would also provide Judith tickets to the symphony at the Kennedy Center for every performance. In his private box. “How could I refuse?” she said. “I pretty much went every night.” Her clients also have included the Kreeger Museum, where she’s been conservator in charge of paintings since 1980, George Washington University’s permanent collection,
April, 2013
John Marshall at Fauquier courthouse never looked better
Judith Tartt surrounded by Monet, Cezanne and Picasso
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BOOKED UP
In the Kitchen with E TylEr
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Middleburg Memories with Ed Wright
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magine for a moment, standing over a painting by Van Gogh, Cezanne or Picasso with all the materials of your own art at the ready. Perhaps there’s a tiny tear in the canvas, an almost imperceptible smudge, a minuscule crack in the varnish, with all those blemishes barely visible to the naked eye. For Judith Watkins Tartt, a worldclass art conservator with an international clientle, it’s all in a day’s work at her cozy studio in a former mother-in-law’s cottage house on the Fauquier County farm she shares with her husband and former Washington gallery owner Jo Tartt. For most of the last five decades, she’s been restoring works ranging from masterpieces produced by many of history’s greatest artists to that cherished antique portrait of a great grandmother recently discovered in an attic trunk. She’s been performing her magic since 1975 and remains as enthusiastic about her craft as ever. Her superb skills remain in constant demand, from museums, auction houses, galleries, private collectors and just about anyone who walks in with a piece of art that needs help to regain its original luster and vibrant color. In essence, she brings the painting back to life, just the way it appeared fresh off the artists’ easel, no matter how many years ago the last brush stroke was completed. And yes, she admitted in a recent interview, “there is some fear, there is stress. But you also operate from a basic premise that anything a conservator does to a work of art has to be reversible, so that
if a new treatment is discovered in the future, our work can be reversed without doing any harm to the painting…The fear of falling short is a constant with me. My most difficult problem is knowing when to finish.” A native Washingtonian who’s father was an attorney working for the National Gallery of Art, Judith was actually born far-sighted, then became cross-eyed and was wearing bifocals at 3. She had surgery at eight to correct her problems and said that from an early age she was always obsessed with vision. As a child, she often played with magnifying glasses and jewelers loops, and while she also enjoyed drawing, she was even more fascinated, she once said, “in seeing how the artists created depth and made transitions rather mily than the subject matter of the painting. ” Growing up in the shadow of the National Cathedral, she graduated from the National Cathedral School (NCS), then studied art history at George Washington University, where she copied masterpieces and also took a far more technical course that involved learning about all the materials and implements she uses in her practice. After graduating, she began an apprenticeship at the Georgetown studio of master conservator H. Stewart Treveranus, and knew right from the start this would be her cherished niche in the world of art. She went on to study art conservation in Florence, Italy, came back to work in the studio and after five years decided to go it alone, a decision that eventually resulted in work that took her to Hong Kong, where she served as a contract conservator for the Hong Kong Museum in the 1980s and ‘90s and also had a stint as
M i d d l e b u r g L i f e
M i d d l e b u r g
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By Leonard Shapiro For Middleburg Life
It’s Tartt, as in Art, Restoring Masterpieces While Doing No Harm
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