Material and weathering
Bronze outdoors and near the sea
Bronze is the most durable material you can put in a garden. Bronzes from antiquity have lain in the sea for two thousand years and are still there.
What changes is the surface.
What happens
The patina a work arrives with is applied by the artist at the foundry: warm brown, black, green, depending on the piece. Patina is the coloured layer on the bronze surface, produced chemically and burned in with heat. Outdoors the weather keeps working on it. Near the sea the colour moves towards green over the years; where rain does not reach, it stays darker.
That is not a defect. A bronze in its fifth year looks better than in its first.
What you should do
Rinse it once a year with clean water, twice on the coast. Then let it dry and rub it with colourless wax paste, the kind used on furniture. One afternoon in autumn, no more than that.
Do not use: a pressure washer, scouring agents, metal polish. In ten minutes those remove what took the artist days.
If something does go wrong
Green streaks that stain the plinth, and white spots, can be taken back. That is not a job for a gardener but for a conservator, and we tell you who on the island does it.
Right by the water, bronze is the material we recommend where corten steel drops out. Why that is, is set out under Corten steel by the sea.
Questions about a work you already own? Ask us anyway.