this incredibly luxurious object here is actually a he traveling service that was
presented to the adopted daughter of Napoleon Stephanie he presented her with
an enormous dowry largely because when he adopted her she became a sort of
political porn in all his maneuverings across Europe traveling sets like this
became particularly fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in
French these objects are known as the necessary because they contained all the
necessities of life so in this case it's aimed at a female recipient so it has
all the objects that were required for making tea coffee and chocolate but it
also has dressing implements in there as well it's made by the court Goldsmith
whose name was viene and he's actually signed the box here Vienna was renowned
for working in the most opulent materials available but PNAS real
mastery was in being able to display the objects in a very attractive way
Stephanie's daughter married the Duke of Hamilton and so this was left to her and
it was transferred to Scotland and in the 1930s it appeared for sale Queen
Mary was particularly fascinated with any objects relating to Napoleon and so
she acquired it at that sale and it's usually on display at Windsor Castle
it's recently undergone cleaning and conservation work in order to be
photograph for a forthcoming catalog of silver in the collection
whenever you cleaning silver objects there are a huge amount of variables
which can affect how tarnish is removed it depends how the surface of the silver
was originally worked it may be harder or it may be softer it depends on the
kind of environmental conditions it's been subjected to and also obviously if
it's something hasn't been clean for 50 years it's gonna be a lot harder to
remove the tarnish then if it's been six months
the rule of thumb is you clean the surface using your solvent and then you
start with the mildest abrasive that you know it's got a fair chance of working
and see if that works and move on from there
because the risk is you can obviously scratch the surface of the silver
underneath the tarnish over time the service of silver will react with the
environment it reacts with your fingers it can react to gases given off when
you're cooking and the overall result is the silver will darken we would always
always wear gloves when handling silver or cleaning silver and that's to avoid
us causing tarnish while we're trying to clean the object there's two ways that
you can remove silver tarnish you can dissolve it off with a chemical or you
can rub it off we chose to rub it off really carefully with very mild
abrasives because we feel it gives us a lot more control and that if you use
chemicals a chemical to dissolve it off you can end up with quite a bleach
looking surface one of the things we use is this rubber which is like it works
like a pencil eraser and we can take the rubber and mix into it the abrasive of
our choice this one is made with chalk the effects the chalk is slightly damped
down by being the rubber so it's mildest so we'd start with this then we go to
dirt 2 measures earth is our next port O'Call and then precipitated chalk if
it's really not wanting to shift with this the abrasive particles will
encapsulate and rubber see literary dust them away
after we've removed the tarnish that we think we need to remove we'd go over the
surface clean any abrasive pad we've missed but the last thing we would do is
always we clean the surface with a solvent and you get bamboo stick wrap
some cotton all around the end so it looks like a q-tip it's a easy way it
makes it easy to clean silver the cleaner you can leave a silver object
that more slowly it will tarnish when we came to prepare this object for the
catalog it had been on display for quite a long time at Windsor Castle and it was
quite badly tarnished so it's really wonderful to be able to see it now in
its gleaming form