Repairing Shep Paine’s Box Dioramas and “Old Abe” Vignette at the Brandywine Museum of Art (Round Two)

By Jim DeRogatis

The 2024 Shep Repair Crew: Jim DeRo, Joe Berton, and Barry and Joan Biediger. Photo courtesy of the Brandywine Museum of Art. 

One of my fondest memories of time spent with Shep Paine came 12 years ago, when he and I spearheaded a project at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA. At their request, we repaired three of his four box dioramas in the collection of the great artist Andrew Wyeth, which were going on public display for the first time as the museum opened Wyeth’s private painting room in an outbuilding on its grounds. Our friend Darryl Audette documented that work in the museum’s repair room, which included replacing the old, burned-out automotive light bulbs with new LEDs (Darryl and I handled the soldering iron) and paint touch-ups on some of the figures (brushes worked by then-MMSI President Mike Cobb), while MMSI supporter Dan Bird and MFCA majordomo Dennis Levy cheered us on. Shep supervised (and sometimes napped). Hard to believe that Shep, Mike, and Dan are all gone now, but the art is immortal—or close to it, so long as it’s properly maintained.

To that end, when MFCA member Jack Lynch led a group from that club to tour the museum and see the three boxes and the “Old Abe” vignette (properly titled “The Union Forever! The 8th Wisconsin at Hurricane Creek”), he noticed some repairs in need to the latter and “To a Fair Wind… and Victory!”. His observations combined with the realization that the old 12v transformer in the “Mr. Christian!” box purchased at auction by Jerry Hutter last year had caught fire and wreaked considerable havoc to that box prompted me to contact the museum and ask if Joe Berton and I could make a second repair and restoration visit during our road trip out east for the MFCA Show in May. Why we didn’t replace the already-ancient Radio Shack relics with new, modern transformers in 2012, I’ll never understand, but in true purist fashion, Shep wanted us to alter as little of the original artwork as possible, and the old transformers still worked. Absolute authenticity is not a good idea when it comes to aging, dicey electronics, however—just look at how much work Jerry had to do to bring “Mr. Christian!” back to life!

The jobs facing us as I returned to the museum workroom were more extensive than I’d originally thought. Thankfully, Joe and I had the help of box masters Barry and Joan Biediger. Together, we spent an entire eight-hour day and several hours the next morning all working furiously to bring the art back to top shape. Joe handled a troublesome rifle suspended from a canteen that had fallen off on “Old Abe,” as well as repairing the sideboard in the Victory diorama (which is actually set in the admiral’s cabin of the HMS Elephant on the eve of the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801). “From a diorama standpoint, the setting on board [Nelson’s] temporary flagship, HMS Elephant, was even better than the Victory, where the admiral’s dining cabin was enclosed by bulkheads fore and aft; on the smaller Elephant, the cabin opened onto the stern windows, where the lights of the city of Copenhagen could be seen flickering in the dark,” Shep told me in our book. Alas, some of those windows had come loose—Joe fixed those, too—but thankfully, the fiber optics were still keeping Copenhagen glimmering in the distance.

Barry led the work on “Napoleon at the Tomb of Frederick the Great,” one of Shep’s very best boxes, and reworked one of the candelabras that was missing in the Elephant, while I concentrated on the electronics in “Doctor Syn,” which had been commissioned by Betsy Wyeth as a gift for her husband, based on his painting of the same name. Joan stepped in anywhere and everywhere as needed, which was often!

 Above left: Joe at work on “Old Abe” (photo by Jim); at right, Jim rewiring “Dr. Syn.” Below: all hands on deck for wiring the candelabra in “To a Fair Wind… and Victory!” (the latter three photos by Joe).

 The boxes’ inner scenes: “To a Fair Wind… and Victory!” (1980), “Napoleon at the Tomb of Frederick the Great” (1978), and “Dr. Syn” (1982), plus some of our tools and the restored vignette “The Union Forever! The 8th Wisconsin at Hurricane Creek” (1981). Shep produced all of this astounding work in a five-year span, and that wasn’t even everything! Photos by Joe.

Above: Collector Bill Neustadt (seated at  center) brought a contingent of Italy’s best modelers and biggest Shep enthusiasts to visit the museum and say hello to the work crew as it labored. Standing, from left: Riccardo Ruberti, Fabio Nunnari, and Ivo Preda (photo by Joe). Bill also joined with fellow U.S. collectors Dave Shults and Alec Dawson to make a donation to the museum to fund the Shep repairs. Below: You’ll note that earlier, I said Andrew Wyeth owned four of Shep’s boxes. The fourth is “Barracoon,” Shep’s last box in 1997, commissioned by Betsy Wyeth as another gift for her husband on his 80th birthday, and based on his 1976 painting. It resides at the Wyeth Center in Farnsworth, ME, and Joe and I have been asked to restore that, too, sometime next year.

 Above: Restoring “The Union Forever! The 8th Wisconsin at Hurricane Creek” (Photos by Joe). Shep originally displayed this text with the piece: “There was no finer symbol of the Union’s drive to victory in the Civil War than ‘Old Abe,’ the famous war eagle of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry. This legendary mascot was a genuine American bald eagle, a seasoned veteran of twenty-five battles and as many more skirmishes. For it was in the fury of battle that Abe really showed his spirit, springing from his perch and screaming defiance at the enemy shot and shell bursting around him.” In our book, he told me, “The Confederates once placed a bounty of fifty dollars on his head, dead or alive, but in spite of having three bearers shot out from under him, the bird was never seriously wounded. He did have several feathers shot away, and during the assault on Vicksburg, he actually had a spent ball shear a path across the feathers of his breast without breaking the skin.”

Below: The restored boxes and “Old Abe” back on display in Andrew Wyeth’s painting room.