Category: Conservation
Spot the difference
December 14 2012
Picture: TAN
In The Art Newspaper, Emily Sharpe has news of the emergence of a putti in a picture at the Blanton Museum of Art in Texas:
The recent cleaning of what was believed to be a relatively straightforward composition of a 17th-century female nude in the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, took a turn of mythic proportions when conservators discovered two additional figures: a putto and a recumbent Zeus. They elevate the painting’s main figure from a mere mortal to Danaë, the daughter of a mythical Greek king and the mother of Perseus, a son of Zeus. Scholars have attributed the work to a follower of the French painter Simon Vouet (1590-1649).
The newly discovered figures had been scraped away and painted over at some point after the artist’s death. “[The alterations were probably] done either to hide badly damaged figures or to make the work more marketable and in keeping with the tastes of the 19th and early 20th centuries,” says Colette Crossman, a curator at the museum, who suspected that the painting had been altered. “The composition did not make sense and the subject matter did not connect to the standard [17th-century] iconography,” she says. After discussions, the curators and conservators decided to remove the overpainting and restore the figures.
Fresco Jesus - the revenge
December 12 2012
Picture: Ebay
Here's a weird one - a picture by the restorer of 'Fresco Jesus', Cecilia Gimenez, has reached EUR610,000 on ebay. Next bid is EUR620,000 if you fancy it. I somehow doubt the winning bidder will pay up. But you never know. Maybe Alberto Mugrabi thinks she's the next big thing.
Update - a reader writes:
I think you have misinterpreted the eBay price for this picture. The comma is the European equivalent of our decimal point, so the price is only 620 euros.
Oops. Sorry about that. Lucky I'm not a journalist.
Things you don't expect to see in the Courtauld
December 4 2012
Picture: BG
Oops...
Before 'n After (ctd.)
November 22 2012
Picture: BG/Philip Mould & Company
With apologies for my rubbish photos, allow me to share with you this nifty piece of restoration. When the above portrait of a boy in red came to us he was attributed to Zoffany, and in a rather muddy brown background. It was quite a surprise to find the original sky background beneath a layer of later over-paint. The over-paint was probably late 19th Century.
The picture is by Nathaniel Dance-Holland RA (1735-1811).
18 months
November 21 2012
Picture: Guardian
That's how long it will take conservators at Tate Modern to repair the recent graffiti damage to Rothko's Black on Maroon. From the BBC:
Julia Nagle, a London-based independent paintings conservator, explained that repairing a painting such as Rothko's would be a lengthy process.
"Rothko is difficult in the sense that he painted using lots of different media, which narrows down the choice of solvents that can be safely used on his paintings," she told the BBC.
"Graffiti pens are made to work outdoors and survive rain and all kinds of things, so it's something that's quite noxious that has then gone right through the paint into the canvas below."
Meanwhile, the Polish pillock who did the damage is free on bail, having pleaded guilty to; 'criminal damage to property valued at over £5,000'.
The maximum penalty for this is ten years in jail. I don't mean to sound vindictive, but for the sake of unglazed art in galleries everywhere, this man needs to go down for a long time.
Behold - the young Van Dyck
November 16 2012
Picture: Prado/Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenen Künste, Vienna
Christmas has come early for this Van Dyck anorak, with the apparent news that Van Dyck's earliest Self-Portrait (above, c.1615) has been cleaned.
I say apparent, because I don't know quite when it happened - but the image on the Prado's website for their forthcoming 'Young Van Dyck' exhibition shows the picture looking very different to all previous illustrations of the picture. So I presume it has been cleaned for the exhibition. Before, the picture was hard to interpret thanks to what looked like ingrained dirt and old varnish remaining in the impasto (see below, and here), and, from the photos at least, was a trifle underwhelming. Now, however, the picture looks as wonderfully fresh and spontaneous as you'd expect a youthful Van Dyck self-portrait to look. It's completely fantastic.
The exhibition opens on 20th November, till 3rd March 2013.
Incidentally, please note how different this undoubted self-portrait is to the Portrait of Van Dyck by Rubens at the Rubenshuis (below) of about the same date, which has lately (and most curiously, in my view) been attributed to Van Dyck. I see for now that the Rubenshuis website still identifies the picture as by Rubens, which is a relief. You can see a high-res image of the Rubens here for comparison with the Prado picture.
Fresco Jesus - the restorer's story
November 15 2012
As told to Saturday Night Live.
More on the Prado's new Titian
November 13 2012
A reader has kindly alerted me to the above video, in which we can briefly see the Prado's St John the Baptist by Titian before it was restored. It looks very damaged, but much better.
I've asked the Prado for an image of the picture in its stripped down state, but answer comes there none...
Ouch - pictures damaged in UK museums
November 12 2012
Picture: Tate/Telegraph
A Freedom of Information request has revealed the number of pictures recently damaged in British museums. From The Telegraph:
In one of the more comical incidents, at the National Portrait Gallery, the ornament on a frame around a painting of John Dryden, the 17th century poet, by James Francis Mauber valued at £25,000 was detached after a visitor who was part of a large tour group was accidentally knocked off balance by a security officer and fell onto it.
At the British Museum, a 17th century Edward East night clock was broken when a visitor lost their footing and knocked it over, while a valuable Japanese clock was damaged after a cleaner accidentally stumbled into it during a power failure.
But Tate Modern is also a repeat offender.
Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Whaam!, one of the earliest works of pop art which depicts an exploding plane, was defaced when one visitor decided to dispose of what was thought to be chewing gum on the picture itself rather than in a nearby bin.
Most of the examples cited look to be the inevitable accidents. It would be a shame if stories like this led in any way to new rules that make it harder to move or look at paintings.
November...
November 12 2012
Picture: Philip Mould & Company
...is always one of our busiest months of the year. I'm not entirely sure why - it may be because people are thinking acquisitionally, ahead of the December Old Master auctions. Today, for example, my colleague Emma Rutherford sold three miniatures, all to new clients, and I sold the above Romney of Mrs Raikes and her Child.
The Romney had been most curiously over-painted by a duff restorer. The detail below shows Mrs Raikes' arm, which had been entirely re-touched in a gloopy brown glaze. This glaze obscured all the form and detail in the dress, and all trace of shadowing above and below the arm. (The right-hand side of the picture below shows our cleaning test). It was as if the previous restorer only had one dark colour on their palette, and decided to restore the whole dress in that one colour. And because it didn't match all the areas he or she needed to restore, they simply re-painted the whole dress in same shade of dark brown. Now that we've taken all this gunk off, the picture has blossomed into one of Romney's more engaging maternal portraits. It's a testament to my boss's x-ray vision - he thought he detected something more promising beneath the over-paint, even from the auction house's photographs.
The picture once belonged to the great collector Henry Clay Frick - did he perhaps employ the restorer from hell? Possibly. But actually we find this sort of thing quite often - restoration standards, even until relatively recently, were far below what we expect today. If you had an area of damaged background, for example, it was easier just to re-paint the whole background one colour, rather than attempt to fill any individual holes. Romney was hotly collected in the US in the early 20th Century, and it's often the case that Romney portraits which have at some time been in America have suffered from unneccessarily extensive restoration. Here's a previous example. Perhaps it was something to do with the American market wanting their pictures to look new and shiny bright.
How not to restore Titian toes
November 7 2012
Picture: Museo Prado
A reader has secretly sent me a high-resolution image of the Prado's newly restored Titian discovery. Just for now, I'll treat you to a close-up of the toes.
Greenwich's Painted Hall to be restored
November 7 2012
The Guardian reports that Sir James Thornhill's painted hall in Greenwich is to be restored. A large part of the cost is being met by our new best friends, the Heritage Lottery Fund:
The £335,000 grant from the heritage lottery fund will pay most of the cost of the £475,000 first phase of the work, on the enormous west wall, which features giant figures of George I towered over by allegories of naval victory, surrounded by children and grandchildren including the future King George II and Prince Frederick, father of the future King George III, with the artist himself standing meekly in the shadows in the foreground.
The total cost including later work on the ceiling and remaining walls will be more than £2m. Events including scaffold tours are planned while the work is carried out.
Giotto, or Grotto?
November 7 2012
Picture: Telegraph
Restoration work at the Chapel of St Nicholas in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, which was damaged in an earthquake in 1997, has revealed evidence to suggest the frescoes may be the work of Giotto. More here.
Update - a reader writes:
If Ghiberti thought he was at Assisi it's good enough for me. If you look at his evolution between the Arena Chapel in 1305 and the Bardi Chapel in 1325, the St Francis cycle could be the same painter in the 1290s. The secondary figures in the Arena Chapel are like figures from Assisi. Giotto is the moment painting starts walking on two legs. I don't think he ditched the icon style overnight.
New Titian discovery unveiled at the Prado
November 5 2012
Picture: Museo Prado
In September, I mentioned (actually, it was a bit of scoop, in English at least) that the Prado would soon be unveiling a newly discovered Titian of St John the Baptist from their collection. Now, the restoration of this previously over-looked and much damaged original has been completed, and the picture will be the subject of a new mini-exhibition. From the Prado website:
Saint John the Baptist is the only work by Titian in the Prado not to have originally been in the Spanish royal collections. Rather, it came via the Museo de la Trinidad, entering the Museum in 1872 as by an “anonymous Madrid School artist of the seventeenth century”. As such it was sent fourteen years later to the parish church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen in Cantoria in the province of Almeria.
[...] in 2007 the Museum embarked on a study of the work, reaching the conclusion that it was not a copy but an original by Titian. Technical characteristics such as the preparatory layer of white lead with added calcium carbonate as well as the similarity between the landscape and those found in other works by the artist of the early 1550s allowed for its date to be established.
The painting arrived at the Museum in extremely poor physical condition. The recent, outstanding restoration by Clara Quintanilla has recovered the composition’s legibility by re-establishing the balance between the figure and its setting. Furthermore, in the less damaged areas (the sky and landscape) it is now possible to appreciate Titian’s grandeur and subtlety. The importance of this new Saint John the Baptist is not, however, aesthetic (the work is too damaged) but rather documentary. Firstly, research has shown that this was one of the artist’s most popular religious compositions in Spain, evident in the large number of copies that have been identified. The fact that the earliest are from Zaragoza and nearby suggest that the painting’s first owner lived there, who may well have been Martín de Gurrea y Aragón, 4th Duke of Villahermosa (1526-1581). Secondly, the painting constitutes an exceptionally important record of how Titian repeated his compositions (see below). Finally, it provides information on the other two versions of the subject, strengthening the arguments for the autograph status of the El Escorial painting, which has recently been questioned.
All very interesting, but excuse me for saying that, on the basis of this photo, the restoration leaves something to be desired. The formless drapery, the overly rendered face, and in fact most of the body (what's with those curious toes?), looks as if it has been restored in the same workshop as the famous Fresco Jesus. It's interesting that the Prado has not published a high resolution image - surely, if the museum wants us to believe that, despite the damage, this is really a Titian, we need to not only see a decent photo of the picture as it is now, but, more importantly, one showing the picture stripped down, so that at least we can see what remains of original Titian there are left (not much, I suspect).
Update - find more coverage in The Art Newspaper.
Update II - a reader writes:
In light of the most recent case (Titian, ‘St John the Baptist’, Prado) do you agree that restorers should, in such drastic cases, be strictly prohibited from extensively repainting canvases? The most important value of any painting, whatever remains of it, is artistic, and that lies solely in the original and not in any subsequent repainting that hopes to represent what the original might have once looked like. In such drastic cases (here, of the entire work, only the lamb seems to have been left relatively undisturbed) they might as well have started a fresh canvas, perhaps then placing it alongside the damaged but stabilised work for the sake of comparison. What’s the point of covering up a Titian??
Take your important Queen Henrietta Maria Van Dyck as a valid case in point. Whatever the state of the original was, you vested all of your primary interest in the overpainted hand of Van Dyck. This understandably justified the stripping away of the perhaps more compositionally pleasing 18th Century additions, and this despite running the risk of ending up with no composition to appreciate at all. In Spain’s latest Titian case, the thought process was totally reversed. I’m guessing the Fresco Jesus Fever (FJF) didn’t help when deciding the original’s fate. Perhaps the Prado are looking for a new pop icon? They in fact used the same… logic? as Ms Gimenez.
Titian approves of this message.
In this case, I think I agree. Though of course I would want to see an image of the stripped down Titian first.
Galleries flooded in New York
November 1 2012
Bloomberg reports that a number of art galleries in New York's Chelsea district have been hit by the recent flooding. Sotheby's in New York have also postponed some sales.
Art conservation, Italian style (ctd.)
November 1 2012
Picture: 3PP/Google Art Project
In an interesting post over on Three Pipe Problem, Hasan Niyazi describes why he is so keen on Raphael, and reveals that the first time he saw he Raphael's Self-Portrait in the Uffizi, it was displayed in a rather sad setting (above):
At this point in time, the portrait was in a scuffed corner of a room featuring works by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto. I recall it was near a window, which on the day was partially ajar to allow in some air, showing a glimpse of the Arno river.
Beneath the picture is a portable humidifier.
The headless Duke
October 30 2012
Picture: Bonhams
Just in time for Halloween, Bonhams are offering this decapitated bust of the Duke of Wellington. Bit of superglue, and he'll be right as rain.
Got a dirty picture?
October 30 2012
Video: Museo Thyssen
If you have a picture at your museum which needs conservation, then consider applying to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch's Art Conservation Project. The closing date for this year's grants is 30th November. Above is a video from the Museo Thyssen, which has been funded by the bank to clean Tintoretto's Paradise.
To steal a Picasso...
October 22 2012
...you just need a hoodie, and an inept alarm system. The Dutch police have released footage of the Kunsthal theft in action. It took the thieves two mintures to pack their stash of pictures onto their backs. Apparently the alarm system fitted at the Kunsthal automatically opens the door locks once it has been set off. And since there was nobody on site, and the police took five minutes to arrive, it was essentially an accident waiting to happen.
A Holbein sitter identified?
October 15 2012
Picture: Royal Collection/Telegraph
Conservation of a Holbein in the Royal Collection has revealed more clues about the identity of the sitter. I'll try and get more images, like x-rays, from the Royal Collection. But I'm a bit pushed for time today, so for now, find the basic story here.
Update - see more images and the x-ray here.
Update II - find further details here at the NPG, and watch a talk by Royal Collection curator Clare Chorley here.
