Property News · August 20, 2017

Doctor hue: the paint guru


After years as a special forces soldier, Patrick Baty became a leading expert on historical paint. Ed Cumming meets him When Patrick Baty took over his family’s paint shop, Papers and Paints, in 1981, he noticed customers had lots of questions about historic paint. What colours would their homes have originally been painted? What pigments were available to the Georgians? And what about in Queen Victoria’s time?Often, he found, he didn’t know the answers. It was hardly his fault. The field of historic paint, outside of a few highly specialised niches, didn’t yet exist. So Baty set about inventing it. He enrolled in a course of independent study, identified 100 or so original sources, and began a dissertation that swelled from 10,000 words to 80,000 on the methods and materials of the house-painter between 1650 and 1850. “I like having answers,” he says. “I knew I was creating a reference library for myself that I would be able to draw on. Also, part of me probably had a chip on my shoulder about not having been to university. In those days army officers went straight to Sandhurst.” Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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