Replicating the Palette from Pierre-Franҫois Tingry’s The Painter’s and Colourman’s Complete Guide

This thesis addresses the replication of house paints with period methods and materials as described in the third edition of Pierre-Franҫois Tingry’s (1743-1821) treatise, The Painter’s and Colourman’s Complete Guide (1830). Drawing on documentary sources, conservation and preservation literature, and previous examples of paint replication, it examines the historic materials and methods of preparing oil-based house paints and explores possibilities of accurate paint replication. It also considers paint treatises as an important source of information for understanding historic paints and discusses the history of paint replication in the U.S., including the current interest in replicating historic paints with hand-ground traditional materials. The resulting paint palette augments the collection other paint palettes in the Historic Materials Study Collection at the Architectural Conservation Laboratory at the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania.