This week on Bandow’s Best, I want to share this image. This real photo postcard of a member of the Garde Kürassiers was sitting for sale on the Collector’s Guild website for a long time and I finally decided I would take a chance on it, seeing the potential to clean off the silvering.
As you can see in the image, the silvering was extremely severe, obscuring parts of the helmet. I had found that lightly going over silvered portions of an image with an eraser and then applying a coat of Renaissance Wax would bring vitality back to images and clear up the silvering. Well, in this instance, it worked brilliantly. You can see the before and after shots below.