This afternoon Class 4 went to Harewood House to meet a real curator of the house's collection of artefacts, who showed us their new exhibition all about Princess Mary. We looked at a range of objects from the collection, including several gardening tools and tiny plant pots which were taken from Mary's doll's house.
The children were shown photographs which were details from artefacts and they had to match these to the artefacts in the collection. One of these was a muzzled bear symbol taken from a horse's cart, which the curator explained is the Lascelles' family crest - the pupils were amazed to realise it was the same symbol as on their school jumpers!
The second session involved looking at the toolkit of a curator. The pupils were given special paper to rub in their skin to show how the skin can be quite oily which can have a damaging effect on the artefacts.
We then had the chance to try out lots of different types of curator's gloves which all served slightly different purposes.
Here we see some brush cleaning - the curator explained that you have to brush away from the spine so that the dust doesn't get clogged up near the spine.
Overall it was a fascinating session that the pupils all seemed to thoroughly enjoy.
"It was very interesting and I learnt a lot about the history of Harewood House and Princess Mary." Brandon
"I really like seeing what it is like to be a curator." Gea
"I found it very interesting to learn what a curator was." Taylor H
"I enjoyed looking around at all the artefacts they had there." Oscar L
"I didn't realise the Chinese wallpaper would be so valuable!" Jacob
"I found it very informative and I really enjoyed myself." Bella
No comments:
Post a Comment