Expert WPA Mural Restoration Saves Long Beach Library Mural

Updated Aug. 2026

I’ve spent fifty years pulling old varnish off things people love, and most of the time nobody outside the family or the building ever finds out it happened. This one’s different. A whole city gets to walk past the difference every day.

Nine oil paintings on canvas, each one a scene out of English literature, needed a real WPA mural restoration after fire, water, and a well-meaning but low-grade repair job almost destroyed them. Suzanne Miller painted them in 1937 for the old Long Beach Public Library, then standing in Lincoln Park, working under the WPA’s Federal Art Project, the New Deal program that put artists to work during the Depression and produced murals like these in public buildings all over the country. For decades, these nine panels kept watch over the library’s Children’s Reading Room.

Nine panels, fifteen scenes, straight out of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Lewis Carroll, even the King James Bible. Panel one is Longfellow’s Hiawatha, which is an odd way to open a series called “Scenes From English Literature” since Hiawatha isn’t English literature at all. Nobody involved in 1937 seems to have minded. Some panels get a whole scene to themselves. One panel alone crowds together four different classics: Alice in Wonderland, Markham’s “Man with the Hoe,” Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and Walton’s “The Compleat Angler,” all sharing the same canvas. That’s an ambitious thing to hang in a library lobby. It’s basically the whole English literary canon on the wall to see and take in.

Then the building was badly burned in 1972.

These 9 sections of the mural are titled “Scenes From English Literature.” They depict 15 scenes from: Hiawatha by Longfellow (panel 1), The Fairie Queene by Spencer (panel 2), Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (panel 3), L’allego & Il Penseroso by Milton, The Vicar of Wakefield by Goldsmith, and Rip Van Winkle by Irvins (panel 4), The King James Bible (panel 5), Alice in Wonderland by Carroll, Man With the Hoe by Markham, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Gray and The Compleat Angler by Walton (panel 6), The Lady of Shalot by Tennyson (panel 7), The Tempest by Shakespeare (panel 8), The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (panel 9).

The original library was originally across the street in Lincoln Park in Long Beach.

In 1937, the murals were painted in oil on canvas and then glued to the wall of the library, a mural technique the French started in the 1700’s. . After the fire, the 9 paintings on canvas were pulled off the walls, repainted and glued to plywood… not good for long term preservation. After their restoration, the plywood sections were bolted to the walls of the Children’s Reading room at the public library located at 101 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90882

As a result of the 1972 restoration, over the recent years the low quality varnish has yellowed badly changing all the colors… and water leaked onto the murals further damaging them.

**Questions about the preservation and restoration of a mural, or maybe a family heirloom painting? Call 805-564-3438 or email faclartdoc@gmail.com and let’s talk through what you’re looking at.**

The decision to have an inexpert person do the restoration came back to bite it decades later. By the time our team got involved, we were looking at water stains, vast areas of fogged or whitened varnish, crystallized varnish resin that had gone cloudy and yellow, and one full panel that had wrinkled from that earlier restoration job. The varnish had badly shifted the whole color palette of the mural. Imagine Prospero’s storm in “The Tempest” panel, or Alice chasing her rabbit down the hole, seen through a layer of dark, yellowish-brown, cracked plastic. That’s roughly what visitors were looking at.

Here’s a quick look at the mural before treatment and the condition it was actually in:

What a quality WPA mural restoration actually involves

This is where people usually ask what “restoration” even means, so here’s the honest answer. It’s not repainting. Our job, on projects like this, is to undo the damage without erasing the artist’s hand or trapping the next generation of conservators behind bad decisions.

Scott M. Haskins and Virginia Panizzon led the work, with Julia Betancor on the team. We removed the deteriorated varnish carefully enough to leave the earlier touch-up work intact underneath, since digging that out wasn’t necessary and would have put the original 1937 paint at risk. The colors and details that had been buried under all that yellowed varnish came back into focus, with real contrast and depth in the compositions again. The wrinkled panel got relaxed and warmed back into position, a slow, patient process, not a quick fix. Retouching was done with conservation grade paint, the kind that stays removable and color stable forever… never permanent oil paint, which locks in whatever choices we made that day and changes color with time. Conservation grade paint means if a future conservator, fifty or a hundred years from now, sees the mural differently or has better technology, they can remove our work without touching Suzanne Miller’s. We’re caretakers of her paintings, not co-artists.

Once the surfaces were stable and clean, we applied fresh conservation grade varnish to protect them going forward, the same kind of varnish that also helps guard a public mural against vandalism and graffiti, not just time. We shot video of the actual work while we were doing it too. Over 3,500 people have watched the full two-and-a-half-minute conservation video on YouTube if you’d rather see the retouching and varnishing done step by step than take our word for it:

https://youtu.be/ZJJ7C7edoLs

Suzanne Miller, it turns out, had trained at Fontainebleau in France under a muralist named Jean Despujols before she ever picked up a WPA commission. That’s not the kind of background you’d guess looking at a Depression-era library mural, but it explains the confidence in the figures and the composition. She wasn’t working alone either. Fellow WPA muralists Bessie Pierce Heller and Althea Ulber worked alongside her on these panels, both with murals of their own elsewhere in Long Beach. The local Press-Telegram even wrote her up on January 2, 1939, under the headline “Artists Show Skill in Numerous Murals.” She stayed busy after Long Beach too, painting murals at Jane Addams Elementary, Franklin Classical Middle School, and a printing-history series for the South Gate Library. The library panels were her showcase piece. Her signature and a handwritten inscription are still visible on one of the panels, signed the way an artist signs something she expects to outlast her.

After the fire, they spent years in the periodicals room of the 1977 rebuild before finally landing in the Billie Jean King Atrium of today’s Long Beach Public Library at 200 W. Broadway, and they read the way Miller intended again. Chaucer’s pilgrims setting out “from every shires ende of England.” The milkmaid from “The Compleat Angler,” young enough not to have “so much age and wisdom as to load her mind with any fears of many things that will never be,” which might be my favorite line on the whole plaque. Ninety years after Miller painted them and over fifty years after a fire nearly ended them, they’re a shining piece of that atrium again instead of a faded, yellowed memory of what they used to be.

**One client, Maria Lima, put it this way after working with us on a project like this one: “They are the most professional, easiest to work with firm I have on my list of vendors.” Another, Tammy Pierce, said the restoration process “was meticulous and seemed to be very high quality.” If you’ve got a mural or a public art piece that’s showing its age, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we want to have with you, no pressure, no scare tactics, just a straight answer about what you’re looking at and what your options are. We always meet our budget and our timeline. That’s not a slogan, that’s 55 years of projects where we’ve done exactly that.**

Public murals carry a town’s memory the same way a family portrait carries a family’s. Somebody, decades ago, decided a library needed Shakespeare and Chaucer and Alice in Wonderland on its walls, in paint, for everybody who walked in. That’s worth protecting properly, with materials and methods that respect the next hundred years, not just the next ten.

If you’re the one responsible for a mural, here’s what’s actually worth watching for. Varnish that’s gone yellow or cloudy instead of staying clear. Water stains creeping in from a roof or window nobody’s checked in a while. Any section that looks like it’s rippling or lifting off the wall instead of lying flat. None of that means the mural is ruined. It usually just means it’s overdue for exactly the kind of attention these nine panels finally got.

If that sounds like what you’re looking at, whether it’s on a library wall, a courthouse, a school, or anywhere else the public gathers, reach out. Send us photos, tell us what you know about its history, and we’ll give you an honest read on where it stands. Call 805-564-3438 or email faclartdoc@gmail.com. We’d rather answer your questions now than see a mural like this one wait fifty years for someone to notice.

There’s a line on the Tempest panel where Prospero says, “Upon this shore, where you were wrack’d, was landed… Welcome, sir.” That’s about right for these nine panels too. Wrecked by a fire, knocked around through two more buildings and a bad repair job, and finally landed somewhere they get to stay. Welcome, sir, indeed.

So, present day, the City of Long Beach wanted to recuperate the original appearance of the murals and ensure their long term preservation. Fine Art Conservation Laboratories, a professional mural art conservation firm that had a long history of successful city, state and federal government mural restoration projects was contracted.

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Inpainting or retouching is never done with oil paint. Conservation grade paint, which always remains removable and color stable, were used to correct or blend some of the previous restorations. New varnish provides for better surface protection against accidents and vandalism.

They were then ready for installation into the new public library facilities for the City of Long Beach, CA. However, the panels didn’t go straight from our studio back onto a wall. They were stored, ready to go, while the city finished building the new library around them. The mural series then went in as part of the “fit-in”move in” process before anyone was let through the doors.

The Billie Jean King Main Library had its grand opening on September 21, 2019, and Miller’s mural was front and center, one of the stars of the “show” on opening day, not something added on for decoration afterward. Getting nine large panels correctly placed in a brand new atrium meant working directly with the architects and the construction crew, fitting a Depression-era artwork into a building Miller could never have imagined when she painted it. Eighty-two years after she finished it and forty-seven years after it nearly went up in smoke, it opened with the rest of the building, in front of the public, looking its best and preserved for future generations.

Questions: Scott M. Haskins, Virginia Panizzon, Julia Betancor –  Art Conservators 805 564 3438 faclartdoc@gmail.com