Eli Wilner at home amid the period frames that his company offers.
:Just as a sour note can dull a symphony, the wrong frame can flatten the most magnificent of paintings. So when the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to reframe one of its most popular — and largest — paintings, it turned to framer extraordinaire Eli Wilner to recreate a surround for the monumental and historically important "George Washington Crossing the Delaware."
For Wilner, this was the most challenging project to date for the firm he established 26 years ago this September. The artisan began his craft in a fifth floor walkup with $6,000 he earned running the framing department at another gallery where the sale of antique frames was not permitted. Those were the days when museums and galleries routinely discarded period frames in favor of the contemporary, or even the frameless, and Wilner was ready and waiting to scoop them up. Today, it is a different story; period frames are treasured and Wilner's creations are highly esteemed.
Eli Wilner and Company is no stranger to important projects. The company counts among its clients, in addition to the Met, the Smithsonian, the White House, Yale University, the New-York Historical Society, for whom Wilner artisans have replicated and restored historically appropriate frames. Among the 10,000 or so frames the company has created, many were for such masterworks as John Singer Sargent's "Madame X," Winslow Homer's "Morning Bell" and "Dora Maar" by Picasso.
"George Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze awaits its frame.
The company has made loans of frames to a number of exhibits and has donated frames and services to other deserving institutions. Asked how he determines need, Wilner says, "They have only to ask."
It was no small matter to reframe a painting too large to leave the second floor of the museum where it has awed visitors for more than a century. Eli Wilner and his artisans were charged with replicating an accurate surround for the picture, which at more than 21 by 12 feet, is one of the largest in the Met.
The frame is the most elaborate ever made for an American painting.
Created by German artist Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze in his Düsseldorf studio, the painting arrived in New York in February 1851 to great fanfare. According to Met curator Carrie Rebora Barratt, one Vermont viewer wrote home to his wife describing the magnificent painting but rued the absence of a frame. It went on public view in October of that year and by February 1852, some 50,000 people had paid to see it.
By the time it appeared at the New York Sanitation Commission Fair in April 1863, it hung in a spectacular gilt frame decorated with an eagle crest and patriotic emblems. The frame was made in New York by a highly talented but anonymous artist, according to Leutze's design. While American artists of the era were only moderately interested in framing, Europeans explored frame design and chose carefully.
