University's Old Portraits Are to Be Restored

Chapel Hill Weekly

January 22, 1943

 

It is announced by Harriet Dyer Adams, acting director of the Person Hall Art Gallery that, for the next two months Arthur Edwin Bye., lecturer on the care, preservation and restoration of old paintings in the art department, will be restoring the University's portraits. He will begin with those in the halls of the Phi and Di Societies.

 

Mr. Bye, a former college professor and curator, entered in 1929 he profession of the restoration and reconditioning of paintings. He is the technical adviser to the art department at Princeton and the official restoration for Vassar College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Reading Museum.

 

The University portraits have long needed care. Restoration is an involved and painstaking process and, if time permits, after the paintings of the two societies is finished, other paintings will be examined and repaired. The University owns more than 130 portraits. Some of them are by eminent artists, among whom are Thomas Sully, Henry Inman, and Eastman Johnson.

 

Elton Edwards, a senior in the University, has long been concerned about the work of restoration, and it was he who enlisted the aid of Dean House.

 

Later there will be an exhibition of some of the paintings.