Painting Techniques: From Rembrandt to Vermeer

you you the this this lecture is part of a course that happens in the last week of July called the summer teachers at Institute and technical art history which gives art history professors who come for a week the opportunity to be sort of up close and technical to works of art and be able to discuss with conservators conservation scientists and curators aspects of the technical the construction of the paintings so that they get a very clear idea of how things are made with the intention of passing this on to future generations of other students we're very lucky here to have this program which is supported by the Samuel H crest foundation very generously and because it's when it's held at Yale we also have the opportunity to have public lectures so I'm at it delighted that we've been able to entice Juergen Van Daan to come from the statens museum for kunst in in the Copenhagen the National National Gallery to give a talk and some of his work in this field jörgen I've known for many years I was trying to actually remember when I first met him I think was roundabout 1992 and he when he came to the Marx house having trained in Copenhagen at the Royal School of Conservation as a painting conservator he's very well known for a wide range of publications and I think for me personally his work on panel paintings is something that's particularly interesting and for a time when he worked in Copenhagen he was the conservator for the Rosenberg Castle which is this most amazing Castle which has this whole series of 17th century Dutch panel paintings built into the walls which have been untouched and Euron was instrumental in looking at them and identifying the panel makers who put stamps on the back of hid their panels and being able to build up a sort of whole dynasty of panel makers working in in particularly in in antwerp um we've also been colleagues who have worked together on various committees looking at things and I think one of our most onerous duties was to go to Vienna not so long ago and had this amazing two days looking at Bruegel paintings which in a way was the best treat in my life I think anyway um as well as being the chief head of conservation at the at the National Gallery of Art in Copenhagen he is also the practicing director of cats I really admire your acronym by the way our acronym here is the Institute for the preservation of cultural heritage which isn't doesn't fall off the tongue quite so easily but this is a center for art technology studies and conservation and it's basically bringing together various collections and schools to look to work together to examine various aspects technical aspects of works of art and it's something that we're very very interested in it was started I think in 2011 and and so it is very much along at the same time as we were beginning to think of things along the similar line here at Yale so I'm looking very forward very much to taking you on tomorrow to the Institute for the preservation of cultural heritage on Yale's West Campus and to get some of his comments and probably suggestions as well of course your honors best known for his conservation of the girl with the Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer I'm done at the same time as he supervised the cleaning of the view of Delft and this was done I think in 1994 and was done in public at the time when I think most conservatives we've been actually horrified to have been watched I'm doing such a meticulous work on such an iconic painting and that's something that's really come on and again yawn did a public conservation of a work by you audience when he went to the statens museum for contest in 2005 and I'll get our new lab out at West Campus has a whole series of windows along the corridors through which students and and people pass so they can actually see what we're doing so in a way this is really something that your honors are really much of very much a pioneer in so without more ado I'd like to invite him to give his talk which is entitled and Rembrandt to Vermeer thanks very much thank you very much indeed Ian and thanks for your very kind words and much too generous introduction it is indeed a huge pleasure to be here at Yale to be able to share with you some of the thoughts and some of the experiences that I have been through throughout by now a long career in conservation and studying of art and of course in 60 minutes I cannot give you a full account about painting techniques from Rembrandt to Familia or the better part of the 17th century so it'll be aspects of painting techniques from Rembrandt's early career through some of his pupils and here you have some of his colleagues as well we have Rembrandt as a young artist to the upper left you have heard ow below him to your to your left as how the bleachers was a pupil also by Rembrandt and we have Johannes Vermeer and there has been speculation if four had influence on the techniques of Vermeer so it'll be a cavalcade of mainly these four characters well starting out by looking at paintings one wants to study them closely under the microscope under up to eyes or magnifying glasses you want to try to understand by looking by using scientific techniques can be very trivial ones like x-ray x-ray radiography infrared imaging we look through certain layers of the Pink's or you do hardcore scientific analysis all comes down to try understand the layer build up of the paintings what makes the final film look what it looks like in order to understand one the techniques of an artist is another painting in the same technique where the artist experimenting are we looking at a painting that looks like but is not I want to be Rembrandt so to speak or are we you are looking at as a new new trends in a technical encounter secondly a knowing all this art historians will be better equipped and the public to in understanding what they're looking at in the galleries but also conservators will gain information about what may happen if we conserve treat introduce adhesives into a structure that is composed of a variety of layers what happens then so it is a matter of trying to understand what the artist is about to do or what he or she did and in the corpus of a Rembrandt paintings it's a huge volume there are five volumes and they are thick like this each of them thousands of pages studying Rembrandt's painting technique and his paintings trying to figure out are the paintings by him or not and in 16 1969 Hubert France Annenberg the late Hubert and Sundberg from the Metropolitan Museum in New York where he was a conservator was quoted in the corpus of Rembrandt painting saying that nothing is known either from sources or examination about the way and layer build-up of the paintings and he pointed out to this painting here by a Rembrandt pupil at the Hilda where you see the artist in his studio with all his tools on the table and there were no indications here either to how this techniques how how would you start a painting well looking at paintings means also coming across what I just mentioned painting that looks like the one you know the painting to the left is hanging in the merits house in The Hague painting to the right was hanging in a period room in the Comanches National Museum in nürnberg as a copy after the one to your left it had been argued by a German art historian Klaus Grimm looking at two X radiographs one of each that's the smooth way that this X radiograph looks in the paint application is kind of alien to the way Rembrandt would DAP his paint on whereas the painting in nürnberg had this much more ya fluids and Debby way tossing letting the paints and danced over the panel structure while applying it that looked much more convincing however nobody took much notice of this proposal which was in the late 80s 1980s so the painting was still hanging in the Morrow's house as a genuine self-portrait by the young Rembrandt just before he moved on just about the moment when he moved to Amsterdam 16 30 31 he's portraying himself rather proud posture with an metal plate around his neck as a young soldier he has a hair hanging down here in a little curl it's so called Lovelock that was trendy at the moment so he was very fashionable young guy making his entree on the art scene in Amsterdam what you see here is a CCD camera that makes infrared images and during a routine examination we revealed an under drawing below the paint layer an infrared camera observes the reflection from the white ground below the paint as white and where carbon black has been used for instance in a in tracing of a contour nostril here and I the hair that's recorded as dark as dark as the carbon black would have been when the artists apply that preparatory drawing but is rampant now using preparatory drawings no it was established long ago and since he opened for SolidWorks expressed his concerns about his remembers technique that Rembrandt didn't do this and what's even more interesting is you see the eye drawn here but you see a second one down here you see that line here that is also echoed in a line faintly out here as if there had been a cartoon that could have been moved a model and then we've moved upwards to the final image at least shoots discussion and as we were preparing an exhibition with the National Gallery in London about Rembrandt's self-portraits we had to find out what was going on here those paintings examined by infrared imaging and there's absolutely no hint of any underdrawing in the one in nürnberg but lots of sketching going on in the one in the markets house those paintings were taken to neuron back or rather the masters painting was was taken to Nuremberg so we could compare them with the same technologies same sets of eyes a number of scientists a number of conservators and the two directors and a couple of curators looked at them for two days examined and the Maritimes director had to agree that these paintings should be reversed it is the neuron bear painting that is the first and unique version by Rembrandt himself whereas the merits has painting is by so-to-speak an unknown artist at the moment after the painting in nürnberg but with a different poster and that's the interesting if you imagine you overlay this painting over this one you would get the eyes down here where the first version was drawn so to speak so it must have been somebody carefully copying and then deciding to to get him more erect in the final version when a painting change attribution and one of the young curators at martyrs was mad at me when this happened said how can you do this this is a foundation of my belief of the young Rembrandt his painting techniques it has echoes elsewhere and these two paintings as you can see one in Indianapolis to your right and thought to be the copy after the one in the moa Museum in Japan actually also due to this changed attribution because the fine and delicate handling in the brushwork of the one in the moa museum and in the Maritimes was alien to what the young Rembrandt actually is like when you look at him very carefully Rembrandt has been seen as having a kind of linear progression in his way of painting from very fine and delicate to being rough painter in his late years well that's modification if you look at this early painting it's a very tiny panel in the Rijksmuseum and look at it also here with infrared imaging and I will reverse in a minute you see here in a dark area we hardly can see anything with the naked eye a lot of vivid brushstrokes come about there's a lot of brass handling going on down below the surface as also in the old woman's head over here there the brush is stabbing around to indicate also an almost sculpt the wrinkled old face of that old lady contrary to the young lady down here that's much smoother in paint application so it all matters as to what is going on the elements dictate the way you brush the paint up other aspects you can see with an infrared imaging and here of one of the paintings in the Rijksmuseum I was fortunate to have support from our director Damaris has to travel extensively in the years after we discovered that on drawing to examine not only in Amsterdam but in Japan in the US and and elsewhere paintings by Rembrandt to see were there any others with under drawings I'm happy to tell you that they were not but look at the eyes of this young lady also sculpted kind of loose brushstrokes you can see the brush being handled here but what's interesting with infrared image is that the white in her eyes is black in the infrared image meaning there is carbon black in the white of her eyes and now after this talk you can look at your neighbors eyes and you will discover that they are not white they are of course slightly bluish and this is a trick that the artists have if you mix black into the white you can get this bluish haze and that's one of the trademarks you can say here you have you can look over the shoulder of the artist to understand how he created these particular elements in the in the painting my colleague patria noble is here to the right season Australia and she worked for many years at the merits house now she is chief of paintings conservation at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam but we work together that's me over here and we are in a bit of vanishing the anatomy lesson of dr. Nicholas Taub a painting from 1632 when the young Rembrandt you just or had moved to Amsterdam one of his first major Commission's and I wanted to show you a detail on what happens when you remove yellowed varnish you can clearly see the difference between where it has been removed and a small cleaning test here on the chest of that dead body in the painting we know the man he's called re skint he was a pickpocket and were sentenced to death and immediately after he was taken down from the galleys and put on the table of the surgeon so that he could dissect him but at one time in history in the 1950s when it was latest restored the conservators but mainly the curators and the director were shocked about the deadliness of that body looking about the purple nails it really is painted after nature after life as a dead body but that was too much for the public so as the then former director William Martin already said early in the 20th century when we clean paintings we cannot just expose them newly restored we have to cover them up again in a yellow varnish otherwise you'll just look too bright and too horrendous so those of you who have seen this painting before 1998 and haven't seen it since go and have a look again it is a dead body on the table now and not modified to look like a less horrible scenery so the painting technique of Rembrandt is exposed again and not modified as it actually was up until in the 1960s in some situations here we have the steve surgeon nicholas chop himself in a rather damaged state and there's a long story behind why he's still damaged as you he is you can see pink losses all over the place but i would rather like to dive in through one of the paint losses and understand what goes on beyond the surface that you look at and to do this we sometimes take out very small samples of the paint the sample you see up here is one millimeter in total so is it's a magnified tremendously to be able to get the information out we would to look at what you see in the cross-section is here the graze layer that Rembrandt paints his painting on then there are some brown spots here that one looks like a rat running to the right and then there's some some Oakridge paint with red lumps of pigments for the flesh color of the paint and there are some white highlights here on the top there's some cracks in the painting because it's old but this helps us to understand these brown spots here that there's some paint directly on the canvas that sets the scene it's not an under drawing or it sketch to say here it is going to be here that head is going to be painted it is like on this redone thing it is brown paint that is modeled into brighter and darker areas kind of a grease eye in brown kind of a setting the brightest areas sit already by the tone of the canvas and that's great and the darker is that you muddle up and then slowly your model in to begin to apply paint this is a detail from a Rembrandt painting where you see his left and we can see that finally here he has left a lot of the areas unfinished so to speak well this painting is intended as a model for a print so he didn't need to finish it further because the print would be black and white so anyhow but you see all the modeling's here in brown is tonalities in a brown paint that could be seen as a castle earth as an organic Brown it takes quite some time to dry because yeah it takes time to die but these blobs of paint are quite pesto's so probably this is not just oil paint but an emulsion paint glue mixed up with oil because then you get a medium that rise very quickly and you can continue your painting process and this has been analyzed on the anatomy lesson and on this painting by the late carrying groom who could confirm yes that there was emulsion there was glue added to the oils so when you see a label in the gallery's oil on canvas or oil on panel it should probably be mixed-media on panel and mixed-media on canvas because artists experiment and play pays attention to finding ways to be able to reach a goal as quickly as possible and not having to sit back and wait for paint to dry and come back two or three days later to continue quick move up in time to a painting that many of you probably know well the self-portrait from 1659 hanging in Washington and that is an interesting painting when you go up very close to it and this one is supposed to make you look at one of his eyes look how broadly all the brushstrokes have been applied how they've just overlap yeah almost chaotically when you get close to it but at a certain distance it works it blends in our eyes why would you as an artist want to go all the way and make a very fine and detailed surface to your painting when you don't need to do it because the eye compensates for that and when I talked about the the canvas the greatness of the canvas when you when the artist started painting being the mid-tone being from where you set out making shadows where you make high highlights then this paint this area here where you see this grace green tonality you see it over here as well and in here and there that's simply the unpainted support of the canvas the canvas with its priming and no other paint on it so it's really is looking right down to the bottom of the painting so to speak and then with all these dabs of paint building up creating an image of an old aged eye which i think is is a it's a fascinating way that it blends you know the way the eye works it is in the 8th the 17th century when knowledge about how we see started in the 16th and 17th we know much more about what seeing is all about Kepler in the 16th century already wrote some his thesis about the eye as a camera obscura as he describes it and how you see things and how you observe and here is making use of that new knowledge that must of course also be the talk of the day in the artist studios it's a close-up of a very late painting from 1667 and it's hanging the man's house it was quiet while I was there and it's amazingly in it's very almost unfinished it's almost lavish arrogance in painting brushstrokes tapped in and if we take a detail here it's a cuff very down on the sitting on the chair his cuff and look at this that's the ground layer of the painting it's buff-colored Brown is not even painted in as not here either and in many places that buff color of the canvas simply plays in as a very active part of that whole conversation is this also something that his students would take on well here Dao who's painted himself in his duty here on a rather large panel compared to the one in Boston that Rembrandt it was already at the age of twelve assigned to the studio of Rembrandt he's also seen as the one that started the so-called lighten fence Hilde school or the fine painters era from from Laden he is increasingly meticulous in the way he applies paint it's so detailed that you hardly can see the brushstrokes so entirely different from his master apparently his self-portrait over there has been compared now with the portrait I just showed you from the Morrow's house there's a painting by dogs from 1631 approximately same date of an old woman reading and if we go close and look at the Rembrandt and the brush handing there and we go close and look at the brush handling and that old lady in the rice museum there seems to be ways that one can compare this could it have been Dow that painted the copy after his master when he just entered the studio and gave him that other poster we are many that do not know and we are also many that disagree on what we should think about this so I'm not saying that it is like this it has been proposed it's probably it's not the case it is a brass handling that is very close also to what we see Yun Lee Vince do at that particular moment and there's a exquisite painting upstairs in the galleries of a girl in profile by n leavings from the - Auto local collection which is just very close to that way of painting here which is so delicate go and have a look at her and you will be amazed dau also painted paintings that were behind shutters so you would walk up to a painting and have to open it to see what goes on behind I couldn't make it do openings the right way and then a painting like this one here in the boy manse for burning could have been behind it is not these two paintings that I just showed you they do not belong together but it is simply to give you an idea and the reason I do this is also that talking about looking seeing observing also Dao is busy trying to understand how do you see and observe things what happens now when you walk up closely to a painting like the one here environments for burning and well when you are sitting down here you will observe that this this water-cooler here is kind of skew can falls out and this chair also kind of yeah moves out but if you stand in front of this particular painting at an arm's length because that was where you were stand to open the shutters it would work you would know that the distance to the object how it should be ideally viewed would be of an importance and when you expect people to be up close viewing then you also have to finish off your painting in a bit in a finer detail so that's why I needed to do this trick he needed to go in the extreme details with the fur coats and the jackets and the satin dresses because people would be very closed up within half a metre are yeah arms lanes distance where Rembrandt his master would have said no don't go that close to the paintings this may love the paint may even make you dizzy so stay at a distance probably just an excuse to make people understand yes well look your painting will look fine if you had a certain distance to it Dow also used other tricks that he not didn't get from Rembrandt but he got them maybe from the Middle Ages alters a various place when you have a very fine textile like the dress of the old the young mother sitting here next to the cradle and you look closely at that dress you can see that it's a minute detail it's so detailed that it cannot be done by a brush and don't talk to me about a single hairbrush because that won't work at all a brush needs two hairs at least to work now you know from like you know from a fountain pen it needs to to get the fluid stuff out anyhow this cannot be done so this is simply done by brushing over blueish paint and then tapping it with a very fine textile and then you dab away and then you suddenly have an imprint that remains if you have this silk or satin textile you can just make a dab at the same time reduce excess excess paint which makes it all dry out in a better way so it is getting to in one action you could say but looking again with infrared imaging because the tour of looking at Rembrandt's are not Rembrandt's with under drawings included also looking at the feydau paintings and just showing this detail of that same dress look how vigorous the brush handling is down below so he has got the Rembrandt desk you could say way of setting up the image brushing in very quickly the motif and here is going to be this and that light and dark in brushstrokes and then he would apply over that again so we are witnessing a much more active amongst more free hands when we look at his paintings with this technique I just want to show you one other example in this painting from Vienna it's a small or rather small panel as you can see 20 by 23 centimeters is fairly small and there thou didn't use a textile to create this he simply tapped upon his hand right in the paint so it's an imprint of probably the forensic scientist could map out more about dowel with this but it is the imprint of his hand in the wet paint that we see here making the pattern on that textile again something we know from a number of artists from the 14/15 16th century now Rembrandt got a commission in 1640 to paint this huge painting that hangs in the museum you all know it the Night Watch with banning walking here in the front showing all his military people around in this gathering there is music there little girl running about there as a standard bearer and if you look at this figure it's particularly under standard bearer there's how they are how they're painted with the hand in the side and the arm up and he's stretching out his hand you could begin to speculate who could be the master behind these two paintings you have here almost a standard-bearer again or the bending in a painting showing hagar and the until and the resurrection of Lazarus to your left well this is a pupil that entered the studio right at this time and that is Carl for britches he enters the studio of Rembrandt when he is busy with these big commissions and when he is also have just finished the huge painting here in Berlin of the merchant and his wife and we see him here in an early self-portrait shortly after his left liver and burn studio now kalfa pictures he lived outside today I'm in a small town called mitten beamster he moves to the studio of Rembrandt he moves out again to meeting beamster and some other obscure place to end his career in Delft in the Netherlands south of the hague so he is moving around having different influences in Medan beamster there was it was a very tiny place so there were no competing artists that really could could influence him much so he must have seen this and a painting hanging in in Lynette never gallery Ontario is attributed also through the young for bridges now the problem with the artists are the students of Rembrandt working in the studio is that while working in the studio they were trying to emulate their master to the detail and this way their paintings are very difficult to yeah did to see any difference to their master many of the pupils paintings would even have been signed by Rembrandt and sold as a Rembrandt although not really touched by him because that was one way of gaining income from having all these apprentices running about taking his time but the reason we know that it must be from this particular period as well is that it is painted on a ground layer that has this kind of particular composition of lots of quarts of clay and silicates that was invented by Rembrandt when he got the Commission for the Night Watch in 1640 because he knew that when he had finished the painting in 1642 in the studio he wouldn't be able to get it out of the door without rolling it and add additional ground layer would probably crack he was expecting so he had to invent a new type of ground layer that were slightly more flexible and that was this clay or quartz ground as it's being called in the literature that has been studied extensively again by the late Karen Grune who was a conservation scientist in Amsterdam working closely with the Rembrandt research project and many other museums institutions in the Netherlands and in the United States so as this painting here is painted on the same type of ground as this one could be for great use because it has been difficult to attribute it to to any other for its uses paintings though we're the ones that you saw with the raising of Lazarus and the Haga they look very different indeed and one of the things that we we look at I also try to understand the formats of paintings here we have an x-ray of a painting by fabritius at the MFA in Boston and what I have drawn in here are the costings of the stretching of the canvas and they are lacking at the top and at the right age so this is an estimate of how large that canvas may originally have been before it for some reason have been cut down here's what the painting looks like in MFA when you go there and we could assume then that we could in power point at the missing basing pieces to get an impression of the size and the composition and be able to compare it with another one this one which has exactly the same size now as a reconstructed one from a MFA the one in LACMA where you see another mercury at nagas story the two paintings were presented in Ankara pitchers exhibition at the MERIS house in the early 2000s and created a huge discussion among scholars I dare say that two scholars were about to fight physically in front of the paintings because it disagreed entirely on that these ones would be by for breeches I'm happy to say that after having done infrared imaging of this painting we discovered the signature in this shield hanging in the back wall there is absolutely no doubt that this one is and the other one well the boats are painted on the same roll of canvas same type of canvas with the same we pattern 13 by 4 seen threads per centimeter so there's no doubt that these are too early for bridge users entirely different from the woman in Ontario though and here came the addition sorry here's another painting by four in progress of restoration at the Rijksmuseum my colleague Gwen tawa who is an American conservator who's worked at the Rijksmuseum since early 1990s is in the progress of cleaning this painting and discovers up here in the corner not only the the name of the sitter and liver which is his signature but this kind of mess in the background you could say a an old wall that has cracked and been repaired that whole image of that wall and that nail sticking out of that wall had been painted away by a previous restoration treatment either on behalf of a and owner who didn't like that because it looked messy or whatever but it also deleted that tremblay effect you could say that's tricking the eye of having a racked wall in behind and here you see the restored painting which is quite odd why would you as an artist make that little detail right across where you have your inscription which is then hovering out in the air somewhere in front of that or is it painted on the wall and what is that nail doing kind of questions that we cannot answer but that may say something about the artist we are talking about there's no doubt it's for and he is later in his career now and here's another one by for it's not a book it is a painting and and it's hanging and then tomorrow test as well it's painted on an oak panel and you see it here before its recent treatment in the early 2000s you see here a small cleaning test that's done at the edge it is extremely yellowed the varnish it's a natural resin and these resins the yellow it's a natural thing for them to do but we wanted to know more about the painting because an x-ray of the painting didn't show much so we sent the paintings through this CT scanner at the hospital after hours and no patients were having to wait and discovered a little hole inside the panel when you look at it from its edge and you can see here the x-ray image doesn't show much the else then they let white paint that's radio opaque that sits on the entire background we could see though that this ring that sits here around the bird cage you see goes all the way out here it's not painted as a reserve in the lead white so as we'll see later it's a later edition but the panel after have being CT scan there we can reduce on the computer the paint layer and get it away and just see the panel itself and see that here is a dowel hole so this must've written it had been a double size panel of some sort that apparently cracked and is being reused and there's been lots big elation about what is this little painting actually about who would paint why with the artist paint this it's clearly sigh in 1655 and would it be for his children would it be yeah but is it a small tumbler of a bird sitting here there's no obvious story the version you see here on the right there I have on the computer taken away that bottom ring for the bird to sit on which is added later on so we can see this is the first version apparently and then for weights just finished it off with that second ring you know the story about this is that the Goldfinch was was able to be trained to take his old fruit out of this box he could be trained to lift the lid and get the food out and therefore be an allegory of all of us we have to work to get our food and that was seen and plenty of examples of this in douse art actually you see women leaning out of a window and next to it there is a little gold fin sitting on a house like this working to get his food this is what the painting looks like today at the Marx house but a huge explosion happened shortly after this painting was painted and this is the city of Delft after the powder reserve or the the gunpowder what I call it the storage for gunpowder exploded the Blitz uses studio exploded to so to speak it fell apart four was dragged out it could almost be about him here and he died a few hours after he was taken out of his house the Goldfinch however has some indentations in the paint that are not cracked as if the paint was still wet so the Goldfinch may actually have been the latest witness to that explosion and have been hit by debris that had made imprints in the paint and then we still have it about here today so that was an addition to the story you probably didn't know if you have read the books about soup he has four only 32 of eights when he finished his career he paints himself at an age of 32 almost like Rembrandt did it so there is a mental link but he is painting entirely different yet had he had his career go on had he not died in this explosion I'm sure we would have had a fantastic master to evolve from this but go enjoy his paintings they are fantastic already he is playing with peep shows or boxes where you look in and this is one of these it's a triangular box that stands in a museum in Copenhagen when you look through this hole there you rub your nose on one of these spots and that's why this metal plate has these marks of course when people peep in their noses rubber but when you look through that hole you would see into the box an image of a church and it's painted on two pieces of wood that meets it at the back in the center but the illusion is perfect like without looking at the paintings haven't opened the shutter you had the right distance to see exactly that and that's calculated very carefully these kind of boxes to give the optimal illusion of looking into a three-dimensional room two have worked with this and this very tiny painting in National Gallery London have probably originally been sitting in a triangular box and drawing it here but triangular towards the viewer where you would look through a small hole and then the painting itself would be mounted on a semicircular copper plate during its latest restoration by my colleague Larry Keith at the National Gallery in London copper reza nets were found on the backside that could have been the result of having the canvas have been glued to this copper plate to give that image of looking into a view in Delft with her with the music cellar store so playing with these kind of things is something that's important for for britches he dies and in 1655 and at the same time a young artist starts out like four Brits used it with huge historical compositions canvas is larger then he could almost handle when you look at the composition this painting face surfaced in in a sale and was acquired by the National Gallery's of Scotland where it hangs and a second painting by Johannes Vermeer Diana and her companions hangs in the merits house and you know you know why I have done this now because also here we have discovered that the painting has been trimmed it's a history painting it's Diana and her attendants as it says you see diana has here the Christian moon on her forehead so we can recognize her it looks almost like a foot washing in the Christ or in the scene of in a scene of life of Christ and it was hanging like this as under huge famiy exhibition in 1996 in this way and the reason I say it like this is that this computer manipulation not only adds the canvas to the right so that the foot washing comes right in the center actually which is an estimate that's that's very qualified but the blue sky at the top right also vanished that blue sky was analysed and appeared to be Prussian blue and Prussian blue was not on the market until in the very early 18th century and for me had already been gone quite some time of that and now when we look at the painting here and also those who could say those scholars who had been working with Vermeer for many years who could say why didn't I see that now agree yes it cannot be otherwise because this girl sitting here with a satin dress has absolutely no reflection in that satin dress on her back where that blue sky would have been so there is only light coming in from the left as you see in the painting so I think everybody agrees that that's how the painting should be looking and this is the earliest signed and dated painting by Johannes Vermeer entirely different from the small playful paintings by Carver where you look at bright tonalities and enter the play with with proportions and and perspectives now we don't know if this is familiar of course but that was the one I put on the first slide it could be a self-portrait sitting in the painting we don't know the way I got to know from here you already heard from Ian was by a restoration campaign for Mia in hit licked it was called for me illuminated here you see a canopy it white canopy people standing under it not just to hide under the Sun which could be needed out here but they're looking down a window to a room below here's the window up there where my colleague Luke from Duluth is sitting restoring the view of Delft and I have gone away to take the photograph here's the girl with the Pearl Earring and I'm supposed to sit there behind that glass screen and working on it and the public could stand in here with a glass screen behind behind this glass screen and follow the the treatment as the fan seeds and there would be other didactic material explaining what was going on and why we were doing all this the reason we wanted to do this while I set the the studios we had at the monitors were going to be demolished to have the new state accountant building set up there instead so we had to move out in the outskirts of The Hague security was not optimal and taking away two of the top pieces for six to eight months was not really an option for the museum either so we wanted to keep them on view although during treatment and that's I think was was very interesting to open up and go into dialogue with the property grab what happens when you restore a painting because during the program process and that little painting here by the girl with the Pearl has suffered tremendously in the past the previous owners had not cared had not known probably that device Vermeer painting for many years the painting was acquired at an auction late in the 19th century for only two guilders and fifty cent and the fifty fifty cent was for the auctioneer and was then later in 1904 donated to the merits house as a genuine painting by your hands for me and signed monogrammed as well this is what she looked like when I examined her in nine in 94 and we use also ultraviolet light the blue lights to examine surface phenomena and by this you can see where previous restorers have been dabbing on paint too to finish off the image to restore regain a clear image of the of the girl but we could also see more faint areas like this one and up here and there which are older restorations that probably were not removed in the previous treatment but just vanished over and then the latest restorations were done here annex radiograph of that area reveals where the paint has been lost these black and morph areas is where original paint simply fell out of the canvas and this is a very long story so it is very brief now but the painting has tremendous amount of losses along the perimeters where the stretcher had had protected their canvas and there where the stretcher is not protecting anymore in the day size of that stretcher the paint has been falling out probably hanging on a damp wall for for some time so how young and beautiful she is an aged woman and also aged in the sense of that yellow varnish on top and I already talked to you about the varnish on there nationalism and look here what a shocking revelation it was to take away such very brownish violets and come down to the surface of the original paint now also here we had the van is analyzed and but we also had eye witnesses accounts from the 1951 when it was restored for the last time and these eyewitnesses could explain that there were a number of very brown substances in bottles in the studio when this was just finished and it had been applied in sequences of layers but also the museum had decided at that time to add black pigment black paint to the varnish in order to stop subdue listen allottee of the girls bright areas so it was absolutely manipulated and not reflecting a familiars painting technique as we can see it hopefully today here you see some details of all the reflections of light on the face from the natural light that's supposed to fall on her face being reflected up from the bright column right under her cheekbone the pearl is being formulated entirely by light falling on it from one side and reflected light creating that crescent moon form at the bottom peter tearing from back out was a collector and he fancied also like many others go to go and visit artists in their studios he visited familiar and while after having done this he writes in his diary that some of the most extraordinary things he saw in familiar studio were paintings of perspectives or rather if they were perspectives that he saw he writes it all in french because that was very fancy and they patil e+ extraordinaire consisted down there a perspective now is this a perspective probably yes we could agree that this could be a perspective of you normally perspectives would be seen as a latch of you maybe even this we will not call a perspective I assume or should we is this a perspective well freedom and the freeze had already a few years or half a century or more earlier published his publication on how to make a perspective it's very easy you have a vanishing point on the horizon you have to distance point and when you draw lines you can create any sort of perspective freedom and the face was highly influential in bringing this new news to the Netherlands and although practiced already from the early frescoes in the Church of Assisi in Italy it was now gaining more and more popularity now I'm jumping now to a very late painting by Vermeer to talk about perspective because this painting was was asked for the Familia exhibition in 1996 between National Gallery of Art in Washington and my house but had been stolen just previously from the bait collection in Ireland and although the painting was gone it was asked for for this lot for this exhibition unfortunately just a few months before it was recovered in the back other in the booth of a car in Antwerp lying on the table in the Museum of Fine Arts I came in and saw that painting lying with reflected light on the surface and could see that they were indented lines across the tiles somebody had been very careful one of these tiles to be constructed to work as a perspective and looking closer at the painting together with the conservators of NASA garland Island to see if it had survived being traded around it has been in in eastern ball I believe as part as a guarantee for a trade in rocks and we discovered there were two holes pinholes in that eye of the of the woman and these pinholes limits exactly with the central perspective of that particular painting so it is created as a perspective in the sense that you could have a needle sitting in that paint right in the eye in this case and you would be able to have a string attached to it and while painting you could continues to be in alignment with what a real perspective should be like and keep the receding lines in floor tiles in walls a painting like the milkmaid would not show really a perspective would it but yes also here under close scrutiny on an x-ray a small hole in the canvas and the small dots in the surface where something had been dragged out of the wet paint indicates exactly where the perspective is both of the painting and of I'm pressing the wrong button and also where the milk runs out of that jar and if we walk back you will see that it's right here for the window as well so it's all very carefully constructed as a perspective also her Majesties music lesson in Buckingham Palace has been composed and you see the pin holes in the wet paint the artist has not hidden his way of creating this this painting was left on the easel in the studio of Albert Ankara in Switzerland in the late nineteenth century and that's big arrow points to a needle with a string hanging out here it's a yellow piece of string that he also used exactly the same way very carefully composing and leaving it there till the end because you needed to adjust other scholars would lean towards an idea of familiar having used a camera obscura I don't want any heated discussion about this afterwards because it could become quite heated maybe but I see you see this is the idea of a camera obscura you have a room it's completely covered with walls it's dark in there a person has put a lens lens out to the outside world in this war and the outside world brightly lit by the Sun like here at the moment will project itself on the inside of that Hut but upside down and in reverse these kind of camera Obscura's that can do exactly the same but they are portable we're not available in the time of Vermeer so he would have seen this and I agree that he could very well have seen this but I have very big difficulties in understanding where an artist would sit and lay out a composition in a dark room of a composition in upside down and in Reverse just to go out and paint it and then put in a needle to keep track of how to paint it I think that's much too complicated and as I said earlier with Rembrandt applying a quick sketch in a brown paint that's a mixed-media that dry sets and you can continue that's how artists would work like artists painting illusionistic barak marbling and so forth well here's one of the paintings that maybe crosses some of the interest in this and I will be finishing in a few minutes I am running one minute late now I see but this is the girl with a red hat a very tiny panel and very close by in the National Gallery in Washington and when we go close in and look at these two lion finials you should imagine it here you have a chair going out and with its seat here and the the back is here and she's leaning her back to the back side of this chair so these two are sitting there she has her elbow in there and if we go close by yes it is out of focus and is it because an old-fashioned camera obscura could not focus very well had a focal plane only at one level and couldn't see at all or is it simply just trying to mimic something that is again being finished by the eye because we didn't question what this was just looking at it did we need to finish did the artist need to finish it entirely to get that illusion and that's the same with this girl with the Pearl Earring you could say she's sitting there looking at us it's very hard to say what kind of blouse or sweater she is wearing there are some blobs of yellow paint that doesn't really help us it could be the light being caught by a threat but we don't know a headgear is well is alien to any headgear of the period or any headgear we know of but and also fairly roughly painted but a detailed face could it be that familiar knowing about perspectives knowing about and discussing that how the eye works is trying to captivate us to get a very in team relationship with that particular painting by painting the area's unknown interest to what we are supposed to look at a little bit out of focus because our eyes will return continuously to the face and to that very in team contact with that person so it could be an aid to create emotion rather than working with a lenses I believe very well that for me I could have seen one of these things in practice and have been discussing it with colleagues all over however at the time of amia plenty of books are being written about perspective at the same time books for painters they say or are they rather for the amateurs from the connoisseurs for the established for the collectors to read about they we know something about painting by having these books and here you see the allegory of paintings he is sitting here or in Malaysia but she's being taught by the the algorri of measurement how to use a compass how to do SAP lump line a measuring device that's how you could paint if you know the perspectives like also tearing from background notes in his diary after the visit with familiar then you know how to paint and there are various ways of looking at painting and I can I will having a quote that comes out here now from Nicolas Poussin who's writing a letter exactly about the ways of seeing and there I should be quoting and now I need my glasses and pasang mentions one way of seeing is by simple seeing and the other Ponder's them attentively simple seeing is nothing other than natural reception in the eye of a form and resemblance of the seen object and he continues but to see an object with deliberation we search with a particular procedure for a way to understand that same object probably probably therefore we may say that simple aspect is a natural operation while at which I call prospect is a function of reason and depends on three things knowledge of the eye of the visible ray and the distance from the eye to the object almost like a handbook written in the 1640s when the orang asal in The Hague were being established that is the same notion no your perspective laws and how the eyes work as an artist then you know how exactly to create an image that works now last few slides for me as a haloing or these diffusion lines outlines I believe that with the publication in 1651 of Leonardo da Vinci's treatise on paintings where he also writes very carefully about that no objects should have a clear cut line because there is no a line this would be all very diffuse and this foo motto technique that he writes about that this is also how familiar created by overlapping foreground and dressed in two or three sequences and then begin to shine through in the hermeticity is painting again a lot of light is and some people write about for me as the painter of light or he paints with light light falls into the room through these big windows hits this chair and the brass nails but you see reflections from one side but also from the other side so there must be more multiple light sources although we only see the windows here that is at least what he indicates and when we look at details we see that this part of the back wall in Seattle is slightly bluish he at mixes altmer in blue in the shadow parts ultramarine blue is the most exquisite and expensive pigment you can think of and adding it in a background adding it to the tiles adding it in the shadows up here is is amazing and must have had a very wealthy collector to be able to do this note also the two legs here of the as clever simple standing at the back wall they create shadows I have to go back how can there be two shadows when is down behind and that box each others so again for Mir is helping us to understand what we see but he is not painting reality he's simply going beyond the rules now and again to create an image that is clearly readable for the viewer Leonardo also in this case writes about that the light that falls in through windows from a blue sky will be naturally bluish so all objects would be having a bluish shine to them from the direct light the shadow area below the windows would be reflected light from all these and therefore also contain the sum of all the reflected colors that would be this murky tonality here there's one little shadow however that little shadow up there must be reflected light from the street and that's brown because that's again the sum of the colors outside that are being sent up in that direction and indications of light from it's a different painter a front elite you see light from one side on that column from light from another side and the reason I show you this is that that whole notion of play with light is also what you see in a girl with a girl with a virgin all here at the National Gallery in London we see big windows light falling in in abundance from the left but on the back of this chair there's a strong light falling on it and why would that be something out here would reflect light to it or is it just a trick from the artist to be able to make us see that here that it has also a back we wouldn't know this was at least the notion of Familia and you see him sitting here in a 19th century historic painting or fermion history oh the milkmaid is doing the dishing in the kitchen but I believe we should see familiar is indeed with a visit of Peters heating from beer house or other visitors you see the artist standing by his easel the visitor is discussing in dialogue what is perspective how do you paint these things how do you put layer and layer and build up your paintings and I believe that's how we we should see many of the artists and their creations ending up the name-dropping leads partners in cats and at the Museum and all these partners we need to be able to grasp a little bit of all this that it's not putting down in manuals anywhere and that is a steal from the girl with the Pearl Earring film and with that I wanted to close up by saying well paintings are enormous resources of information for much more than just what I've been talking about it's also about you could say globalization early globalization trade was essential to get all the materials in and made available some artists would choose some materials others would choose the abundance of what was available and we can learn about their trade of painting we can learn about their their preset potential buyers from what kind of very exotic pigments with the apply to their paintings so enjoy your collection here come and enjoy our collection in Copenhagen and I couldn't resist ending up being in the United States with a little commercial up here you see the name AFS MK and that is the American Friends of the gallery in Copenhagen and it is very active in setting up now and Hamas our exhibition in New York City later this year in October so come and see our Hamas house on visit it's a Danish Golden Age or learn more about F s MK I know there's a representative our executive director is here amongst us but thank you very much for listening you

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

Views: 208,444

Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, Rembrandt (Visual Artist), Johannes Vermeer (Visual Artist), conservation

Id: _fMJkY41Scg

Length: 68min 8sec (4088 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2015

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Jørgen Wadum, Keeper of Conservation at the National Gallery of Denmark and Director of the Centre for Art Technological Studies and Conservation (CATS) in Copenhagen, specializes in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting techniques. In this lecture, Wadum examines Rembrandt van Rijn’s paint handling from his early years in Leiden, the Netherlands, to his mature Amsterdam period. Wadum then discusses works by Rembrandt’s students before analyzing the illusionistic painting techniques of Johannes Vermeer. Wadum was previoulsy the Head of Conservation at the Maurithuis, The Hague, where he directed the conservation of Vermeer’s “View of Delft” (ca. 1660-61) and “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (ca. 1665). Presented in conjunction with the Summer Teachers Institute in Technical Art History, generously funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.