So devastated was Griswold’s by his wife’s sudden death that he refused to leave her side for thirty hours, when a relative forced him to come home. The couple had married three years earlier, and the marriage would end a little over two years later with Caroline’s death on November 23, 1842. Griswold was about twenty-five years old when he and his wife, Caroline Searles Griswold (1824–1842), sat to have their portraits painted by Charles Loring Elliott (1812–1868). The visit to the conservator’s studio in July 2016 was only one small step in a long journey that began in 1840 in New York.
The Poe Museum in Richmond had recently acquired the piece as part of a collection of Griswold documents, and the museum is now preparing to make these artifacts available to the public for the first time. Scott Nolley of Fine Art Conservation of Virginia was performing a test cleaning on a small square of a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe’s literary executor, biographer, and enemy Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815–1857). Long lost underneath the dull brown varnish, a portrait was beginning to emerge. Underneath the accumulated layers of varnish, dust, and linseed oil, an eye gradually came into focus. The swab quickly blackened as it absorbed nearly two centuries of grime. The conservator gently rolled a cotton swab across the painting’s surface.
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