News-Gazette, November 1, 2025
Krannert Art Museum celebrated its grand reopening on Aug. 28, marking completion of an 18-month renovation of the Kinkead Pavilion.
As the reopening approached, preparators rehung art in the Pavilion’s Bow Gallery.
But two paintings were missing, even as hundreds of visitors streamed through on the 28th.
Not to worry, though. Both were safely in Chicago for conservation.
Late last month, William Harper’s Dusk (1906) and Osvaldo Louis Gugliemi’s The Mill Hands (1937) returned from treatment and claimed their reserved spots in the gallery.
Harper’s Dusk, a 1998 gift of William Van Hagey, hangs below Winslow Homer’s Cernay la Ville—French Farm (1867).
Both paintings convey poetic impressions of the French countryside that might encourage us, in our place on the prairie, to find subtle beauty where land meets sky beyond the city limits.
Harper traveled twice to Europe during his lifetime. It was during the Black Canadian artist’s second sojourn, curator Katie Koca Polite tells us, that he studied informally with Henry Ossawa Tanner and likely painted Dusk.
Guglielmi, an Italian Egyptian immigrant, was commissioned through a New Deal arts initiative to create The Mill Hands, which hangs at the east end of the Bow Gallery.
It’s on view alongside several other artistic representations of laboring people made possible by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project.
Guglielmi, writes Koca Polite, “explored the complex relationship between workers and the industries that employed them,” a relationship museum visitors are provoked to consider in our own time.
Without conservation efforts, however, the museum would not have been able to display the works.
Long ago, Dusk had been preserved with a layer of varnish. That’s good for the integrity of the paint, but varnish naturally discolors over time to the point of obscuring the underlying image.
Dusk had become quite “muddy” with age, according to Kim Sissons, the museum’s collection manager.
Areas of paint loss and abrasions also required filling. Addressing the condition of The Mill Hands proved a different challenge.
That painting, unvarnished, had probably hung in various campus offices before arriving at the museum after it opened in 1961.
Over time, the canvas became brittle and distorted, with scratches and bits of missing paint, leaving The Mill Hands in rough shape.
Museum staff arranged for a Chicago-area conservation firm to examine and recommend a treatment, and advised conservators on treatments that would make Dusk and The Mill Hands publicly accessible again, while preserving both works for future generations of visitors.
Read the full article about the conservation efforts in the News-Gazette.
Author: Peter Mortensen, interim director of Krannert Art Museum
