 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Tablescapes, Conservation of the Certu de Table. Two women stand behind a semi-circular display tray with a mottled silver mirror base and ornate golden sides. This is called the Certu de Table, which is French. It would have been displayed as part of a dining experience in the early 19th century. Light gleams off the fully assembled Certu de Table. There are so many reflective surfaces between the glass and the mirrored element and the beautifully cast and worked metal components that it would have been full of specular quality to really give a feast for the eyes in addition to whatever food might have been served during this event. And at the moment we have the really amazing opportunity to conserve all the pieces. In a lab. What I'm doing is cleaning the surface and a lot of that is surface dirt and grime and also corrosion products from the metal substrate that have come through the gill layer and it caused it to turn this brassy type of color. After testing I've ended up using an EDTA solution, which basically binds the copper corrosion products and then I'm able to clean them away. And so I've been applying the solution and letting it sit for about a minute or so and then I've cleared the surface with DI and ice water followed by acetone because the acetone helps drive the water away because we don't want water sitting on the metal surface. Display objects are cleaned by hand. In addition to having additional specialist conservators working with us on the project, this also enables us as the staff conservators to take a closer look at the technical observations we can make about the manufacturer. So we're using a technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging which is a computational photographic technique that overlays images together looking at different angles of light and it helps you really see surface details in a really precise way. So there's a lot of interesting contrast in matte and shiny. The cleaning is really revealing depth and a real change in reflective surfaces, so reflective in matte surfaces. So this kind of technical examination is something that conservators really like to do in addition to the treatment. We're really concerned about understanding how is it made and how can we see those things now in different ways using new technologies. Beneath a layer of glass, patchy imperfections mar the surface of the tray. And just looking at it, the obvious instability of the silver leaf mirrored elements, clearly a lot of the silvering has started to detach we would say cleave from the glass support allowing you to see both the air gap in between the metal leaf and the glass making it hazy and less reflective as well as some of the tarnish or corrosion that's developing in all these areas where you have these flaky islands or bits. Well this piece is probably the worst conditioned mirror I've ever actually worked on. The real task involved is trying to reattach what has either delaminated and detached completely or what is still there but barely hanging on. He uses a tiny iron. In conservation there's a lot of different aspects of lost compensation depending on what kind of objects and materials you're using. So in this case using a backing material as the lost compensation seemed like the best way to go. He holds a silver leaf sample card to the surface of the tray. A lot of this silver is oxidized as well as slightly discolored so the discoloration is what we're trying to match actually rather than the original silver. A little bit unfair because we get to spend a lot of time with it and so we know that the work really intimately. So there's little details that we see and we really get to spend a lot of time under the magnifying glass. One of the staff conservators playfully pinches a tiered tray.