Between 1937 and 1938, sculptures of the Elgin Marbles held by the British Museum in London were cleaned using aggressive and unauthorised methods. The sculptures came originally from the fifth-century BCE Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens and had been purchased by the British government from Lord Elgin in 1816. By the nineteenth century, parts of the marbles had developed an orange-brown surface colouration, known as patina. Joseph Duveen, a wealthy businessman and art collector, wished this patina to be removed before the sculptures were relocated into a new gallery which he was funding.

The sculptures had been periodically cleaned since their arrival in the British Museum, largely to remove the stains caused by London's air pollution. This cleaning usually consisted of washing with water and mild chemicals; occasional attempts to use stronger cleaning agents, such as sulphuric acid and hard brushes, were stopped after criticism from the public. Duveen encouraged more aggressive cleaning, and some of the sculptures were cleaned between 1937 and 1938 using copper tools and abrasive carborundum. Duveen may have bribed museum staff to allow this, and museum officials initially ignored it.

The cleaning was brought to the attention of the museum's director, John Forsdyke, in September 1938. Forsdyke ordered the cleaning to stop and arranged for the museum's governing trustees to convene a board of investigation. Although the board found that "the damage is obvious and cannot be exaggerated", the museum attempted to minimise public knowledge of the affair and damage to its reputation. The employee who had carried out much of the cleaning, Arthur Holcombe, was sacked. Frederick Pryce, who had been nominally in charge of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, was induced to retire on grounds of health; Roger Hinks, who had been supervising the department due to Pryce's absence, was disciplined and soon resigned. Forsdyke denied that the dismissals were related to the cleaning, and initially refused to respond to enquiries from journalists.

Following negative reports in the press in early 1939, Forsdyke issued a statement to The Times, attempting to downplay the scandal. The government minister Harry Crookshank was asked about the cleaning three times in the House of Commons. Public interest in the scandal had largely died down by Duveen's death on 25 May, though the museum attempted to conceal evidence related to it until the 1990s. Following research by William St Clair, the British Museum held a conference on the cleaning in late 1999. Estimates of the damage done vary; it is generally agreed that the visible effect on the sculptures was slight, and that the principal scandal lay in the museum's long-term attempts at concealment. The affair has been repeatedly cited in connection with the potential restitution of the Elgin Marbles to Greece.

Background

Acquisition of Parthenon sculptures by the British Museum

The Scottish aristocrat Lord Elgin served as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled Greece, from November 1798 until 1803. From 1801, he removed sculptures from the monuments of the Acropolis of Athens, including the fifth-century BCE structure known as the Parthenon. Elgin asked the sculptors Antonio Canova (in 1803) and John Flaxman to restore the marbles: both refused, with Canova describing the proposal as "sacrilege". The marbles were brought to Britain in various stages and on several vessels, including ships of the Royal Navy, between 1801 and 1811.

Elgin proposed in 1803 that an extension of the British Museum be built to house the Parthenon sculptures, but was rebuffed by the government. He put them on display in his own London house from 1807, and attempted to sell them to the state in 1811. On the latter occasion, he refused the government's offer of £30,000 (), which was less than half of the expenses he had incurred in removing and transporting them. In 1816, the House of Commons accepted a petition from Elgin to form a select committee to discuss the marbles: Lord Aberdeen, a member of the committee, recommended offering £35,000 () for them. Elgin agreed to accept the offer, and Parliament voted to approve it on 7 June. The marbles entered the British Museum on 8 August.

The collection purchased from Elgin included 21 statues from the east and west pediments of the Parthenon and 15 of its 92 metopes. It also included the majorityof the monument's surviving frieze. Overall, the purchase included more than half of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon, as well as other objects from the Acropolis, including a caryatid from the Erechtheion, parts of the frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike, and other fragments from the Propylaia and Erechtheion. It also included parts of the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. The marbles Elgin had collected from the Parthenon were initially displayed in a newly constructed room, intended to be temporary but used until 1831.

Early efforts to clean the sculptures

The Parthenon marbles, like many works of ancient marble sculpture, were originally painted, though little of their colour survived into the modern period. By the early nineteenth century, an orange-brown colouration, known as patina, could be seen on their surface. In the first half of that century, scholars debated whether this colouration dated from antiquity or had come about through age: the Irish antiquarian Edward Dodwell thought it natural in 1819, while the German architect Gottfried Semper argued in 1834 that it was the remains of ancient polychromy. Semper's view was widely discussed in continental Europe, and in 1836 the trustees of the British Museum accepted a request from William Richard Hamilton, previously Lord Elgin's secretary, to investigate whether the Elgin Marbles preserved traces of paint. The investigating committee concluded that no evidence of ancient polychromy could be found on them, and that the patina was probably of natural origin.

The British Museum did not systematically undertake conservation work on the objects in its collection in the nineteenth century, though pieces were periodically cleaned and conserved on an irregular basis. In 1811, workmen employed by the sculptor Joseph Nollekens were prevented by John Henning, another sculptor, from washing the Elgin Marbles with sulphuric acid. Plaster casts were made of the sculptures in 1817 and in 1836–1837. This process involved coating the marbles with a soap gel (to assist the plaster piece-mould in separating from the original), which was later removed by washing the sculptures twice with a strong acid or alkali. The marbles were moved from their initial display in the "temporary" Elgin Room, constructed in 1817, to a purpose-built gallery in 1832.

From 1845 onwards, museum officials began to express concern over the surface of the sculptures, which had been stained by the use of coal-fired stoves to heat the room in which they were displayed. The scientist Michael Faraday was commissioned to report on their state, and described them as "very dirty; some of them appearing as if dirty from a deposit of dust and soot formed upon them, and some of them, as if stained, dingy, and brown". Faraday proposed the use of an alkaline sodium carbonate solution to wash the sculptures; the trustees of the museum approved this, and it may have been done regularly. Poultices of clay water were applied from 1857, and in 1858 the museum's trustees gave permission to Richard Westmacott to clean the sculptures with fuller's earth, an absorbent type of clay. An 1858 letter to The Times, signed pseudonymously "Marmor", criticised the removal by cleaning of the sculptures' patina, which the writer took as "the tone given by time to antique sculpture". A subsequent letter signed "W. D. B. S." complained of seeing "a man scrubbing away with some vile compound", and predicted that continued cleaning would require viewers to "bid to the antique beauty of these marbles". At a meeting of the museum's trustees on 26 June, the museum's architect, Charles Cockerell, conveyed Westmacott's assurances that "his preparation contains no chemical mischief whatsoever". The trustees inspected the sculptures and approved the continuation of Westmacott's work.

Charles Newton, keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities between 1861 and 1885, had the sculptures washed again, and also had the pieces of the frieze placed behind glass to protect them from pollution and reduce the need for further cleaning. The sculptures from the pediments remained outside the glass, and were occasionally washed. During the Victorian period, it was generally agreed that white was the most pleasing colour for the sculptures, partly driven by contemporary attitudes towards race, by which it was believed that the ancient Greeks had been light-skinned and blue-eyed. Even after it was shown that the sculptures were originally painted, some (such as the author Arnold Bennett) argued that the removal of their original colour represented an improvement. In the 1920s, they were routinely cleaned with water, hard brushes, and commercially available cleaning products; this practice was stopped after artists using them as models complained that it was overly destructive.

Preparations for the Duveen Gallery

In 1928, the British Museum accepted an offer of funds from the wealthy businessman and art dealer Joseph Duveen to build a new gallery to house the Parthenon sculptures acquired from Elgin. According to the historian William St Clair, Duveen was motivated by a desire to acquire status by association with the marbles, while the museum was partially motivated by a desire to legitimate its possession of them – the Elgin gallery was considered small, hot and dark, and observers including the French author Charles Maurras had suggested that its state indicated that the British Museum was unfit to hold the sculptures.

From 1932, Duveen repeatedly expressed his opinion to the trustees that the sculptures should be cleaned, so as to reveal "the actual colours of the marble" and allow the selection of the most appropriate colour for the new gallery's walls. In that year, Harold Plenderleith, a trained chemist employed as a conservator by the museum, supervised the test-cleaning of a metope and a block of the frieze, using a neutral solution of soap, ammonia and distilled water. The purpose of the test was to find a method of removing dirt which would not affect the underlying marble or patina. Plenderleith's method was used to clean sculptures from the Elgin collection throughout 1932 and 1933. These included the sculpture from the east pediment labelled as Figure G (variously identified as goddesses including Iris and Hebe), as well as the entire portion of the frieze displayed on the Elgin Room's west side. In 1934, the museum published a book stating that the marbles' conservation consisted of regular brushing with feather dusters, as well as an annual wash with distilled water, under curatorial supervision.

The cleaning of the Elgin Marbles stopped between early 1934 and 1936. In the latter year, construction of the Duveen Gallery began, and John Forsdyke, who had been keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities since 1932, was promoted to director of the museum. Cleaning resumed under his successor, Frederick Pryce. In the summer of 1937, 15 blocks of the frieze (14 from the north frieze and one from the west), already cleaned in 1932, were re-cleaned and stripped back to the original marble, removing modern restorations made in plaster and limestone. The work was led by Arthur Holcombe, the museum's foreman of masons. According to his later testimony, Pryce initially supervised much of the cleaning, but was increasingly absent from the workshop. Further sculptures continued to be cleaned using Plenderleith's method until 26 September 1937.

1937–1938 cleaning