Hamilton Reed Organ — Pipe Conservation and Painting by Adrian Card

Pipe conservation and repainting for a Hamilton reed organ restored by Jim Tyler.

Another reed organ restored by Jim Tyler, with ornamental dummy pipes painted by me. These are the original pipes, but the paint was mostly flaking off when the instrument arrived. Working from the surviving fragments, I was able to determine what the original colors had been and recreate the original decorative scheme: a pale robin's-egg blue ground with gold fleur-de-lis motifs on the upper pipes, graduating to a deeper blue-green at the bases, with gilded pipe feet and mouth details throughout.

Unlike the Mason & Risch commission, where replacement pipes were turned and painted from scratch, this project was a conservation exercise — reading the evidence left by 130 years of wear and flaking, and using it to reconstruct what the maker had originally intended. The result is as close to the organ's original appearance as the surviving paint record allowed.