If you have passed Clayton on Penn Avenue or have visited our campus in the last few months, you have probably seen scaffolding encasing it. The Frick is undergoing a multi-year effort to preserve the mansion for decades to come. This includes stripping the bricks of their current yellow paint in favor of a more historically accurate color: a rich gray with mossy undertones.
A repainted exterior Clayton wall.
When trying to decide what color to pick for the house’s brick, conservators aiding in preservation took samples back to their lab in Philadelphia. They bedded the samples in a clear mounting resin, cut and polished them to expose the vertical stratigraphy. Then, they examined the samples microscopically.
The process allowed them to determine that the brick body of the mansion has around 20 layers on the surface. That’s about 150 years of paint! One consistent color that the house was painted over the decades was gray.
A paint analysis graph of a paint sample from Clayton's exterior.
In addition to wanting the house to be more historically accurate, the yellow paint needed to be removed because it was retaining moisture in the bricks. If left unchecked, the layers of old paint could have caused premature failure of the bricks, which may have eventually affected the interior finishes. The new paint is more waterproof and breathable.
A worker scrapes layers of old paint off of Clayton's exterior.
At the Frick, we don't shy away from examining and sharing history from a contemporary lens. Inside the walls of Clayton, we're committed to sharing the complex history of nineteenth century Pittsburgh through our award-winning Gilded, Not Golden tour. Our current temporary exhibition, Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), also highlights an artist who focuses on, as put by renowned scholar Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, remembering the misremembered parts of the Civil War.
While we are not reinterpreting the exterior through the new paint color, the effort has been made possible thanks to contemporary technologies and materials.
A section of Clayton's exterior walls where the new color meets the old color.
Right now, as preservation continues, visitors can see both paint colors on the house – the former yellow paint that is still being removed and the future gray paint. A moment like this will not be seen again in a very long time, so we hope if you come in the next few months, you enjoy seeing the change in progress.
