In this video, I'm going to be showing you the complete conservation and restoration of a portrait painting by the English artist Cornelius Janssens. This painting arrived to me from one of my YouTube viewers, out of state, and when it arrived at the studio, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the painting was in pretty good condition. Even though I had been warned by the owner to expect some surprises, as the painting had been examined at least once before and some concerns had been raised. The painting was in pretty good condition. There were some minor surface imperfections. It had been glue-lined to a new piece of canvas, but most of all it was just really quite dirty. There was an accumulated surface grime and a very, very dark, thick layer of old varnish sitting atop the surface. Now, the first step in any conservation is to separate the painting from the frame so that I can isolate my work. In this case, the painting was held into the frame using a couple of nails, not very advanced and not very secure, so it was pretty easy to remove. I generally don't save these nails because they aren't original and they don't serve any purpose and I can do better. So, because this painting had been examined once before and the client told me to expect some surprises, I wanted to take a look at it under ultraviolet light before I started any conservation. Ultraviolet or black light will allow the conservator to see varnish, old retouching, and old work that's been completed before. Now, as you can see, there's a faint green haze over the entire painting. Now, that's most likely an old varnish layer. You can see those little purple or dark dashes and splotches; that's old retouching. Now, before I do any cleaning I'll make many, many tests to determine the appropriate solvents and solutions that will best remove the surface grime and the varnish without harming the painting. I've left those out on this video. There are other videos on my channel that do show that in detail. Now, it may seem odd to start cleaning a painting in the middle or on the white areas, but in my experience working on thousands of paintings in the past, I've found that the areas of white generally can be more stable and more resilient than the other areas, particularly the darker areas where there may be glazes or thinned out paint. So by starting in this area, I limit the chances that the solvent solution is overly aggressive or causes any unnecessary effects. In addition, I can tell just how far I need to clean the painting because I can use the white as a barometer - that is, when the white is truly clean and pure white I'll know that there's no more surface grime or old varnish to remove, whereas if I started in the brown or black area it may be a little difficult to determine that. Using swabs, I will gently roll over and slightly abrade and disturb the old varnish as it swells with the solvent and pick it up with the swab. This varnish wasn't particularly tough, sometimes they are and they require multiple passes or different approaches to removing them. In this case the solvent activated the varnish, softened it, and then the swab picked it up. Now as I was cleaning this, I started to notice that there appeared to be some brushwork just below the lace I wanted to take a closer look at it, so I used my loop, and then I wanted to see under black light what was going on. I made a couple of initial inquiries with a very very mild version of the solvent I had been using and I could start to see that some content was starting to appear. Now before going any further with any stronger solvents or becoming any more aggressive. I took the painting back to the black light because I wanted to get a closer look at it. Now you can see the lace area isn't fluorescing green anymore and that indicates that it's been fully cleaned but the rest of the painting is still fluorescing green, which lets me know that there's still varnish over the clothing and that I need to continue cleaning to remove all of that excess varnish. Going back and forth between cleaning and the blacklight is a really smart and really effective way of keeping track of what one's doing, and sometimes I'll bounce back and forth dozens upon dozens of times. So I start to clean the costume, his clothing, and you can see that there's a textural difference where I've removed the varnish and where I haven't. Now again at this point I'm gonna go back to the blacklight and I'm gonna take a look and you can see that that section where I had been cleaning the varnish is now almost fully cleaned and there's no fluorescing left. There's still some areas that need a little bit more attention, but I now have a good barometer of where I need to clean to on the clothing. After cleaning the clothing, I'll move on to another section. I like to work in isolated sections of the painting - that is, I will first try to isolate my work within a similar color field and if that's not possible, I will try to isolate it within a similar paint application field and if that's not possible I'll try to isolate it within a section of the content that is a figure or a shape. And the reason that I'm going to do that is that no two paints are alike, no two paints on the same painting are alike and even the same pigments may not be applied the same way, and so it's really important that the utmost care is taken when removing the varnish because if you remove pigment you can't put it back. So by working in an area of like color, like brushwork, or if those aren't possible in an area - kind of a shape - of the painting I will limit the chances that any unexpected results arise and if I have to stop the cleaning for any reason or if I need to change the solvent strength, then I will have a natural boundary or barrier so that I'm not just stopping midway through cleaning the face. This is an approach that was taught to me and that I have applied throughout thousands upon thousands of cleanings of paintings, and there's no right or wrong way to do this. It's just the way that I prefer to do it and it works for me. So as I said, I started to clean just around the forehead. I didn't want to just clean half of his face and leave the other half with varnish on it, for fear that if I needed to stop or something came up, I might end up with a kind of like a scar or a mark where the varnish is ended and where I had to overlap the cleaning. Now cleaning the face is always really exciting, but it's always high stakes because it's the thing that we're going to look at the most, and so by working with a really mild version of my solvent and leaving it 'til I've had enough experience cleaning this painting so that I'm familiar with not only the artists paint, but the varnish that's applied, whether or not that was original to the painting, it gives me the highest degree - the highest chance of the highest degree of success. And so here you can see that I've left the eye 'til the end. Probably because it's always a treat to see what the eye looks like after it's cleaned and I use it kind of as a reward, something to look forward to, but also because I want to make sure that I have as much knowledge as I could possibly have about the varnish and the painting before I go to the eye because, of course, that's the thing we are gonna look at right away, and so leaving the eye 'til the end allows me to take a more confident approach to cleaning it. And now you can see where I have cleaned the face but left the hair and the background. And there might still be some residues that need to be removed but I'll, again, check with the black light before I move on past the cleaning stage. Now cleaning the background, while it may not seem exciting or as interesting as cleaning the figure, it still requires a lot of attention and care because you don't want to take any chances of damaging it. Now a conservator is gonna use a lot of data points when they're cleaning a painting: sight, smell, feel, and even sound, and, if you can hear, there's a different sound when I'm cleaning the varnished area as compared to when I'm cleaning an unvarnished area. And now here this is a spot where I knew that there was over painting and retouching because of a little bit of damage so I wasn't surprised when pigments started to come off. It's - it's helpful to know where the damage is so that when you do see pigment coming off you don't freak out and think that it's the painting coming off. Now, of course I need to get that fill-in material out of the painting before I can do a proper repair. So using my loop and a brand-new scalpel blade I will just chip that fill-in material out, being careful not to damage the painting. And as I remove it I can see that that fill-in material was a little bit excessive. You can see that original paint had been covered by that fill-in material where it was unnecessary. So all of that fill-in, all of that retouching, for a minor little piece of damage. Now the next step in the conservation process is for me to remove the lining. It was probably done because of that little indentation, but we can do better. So I'm going to face the painting and I'm going to be using a heat-activated conservation adhesive that's fully removable and washi kozo, which is Japanese mulberry paper. I'm using small squares because they're easier to handle and they conform to the surface of the painting a little bit better. So I'll apply this adhesive to the entire painting, then I'll apply these pieces of mulberry paper, apply some more adhesive, and let it dry. And this facing is going to protect and stabilize the paint layer as I go forward with the next procedures. Now before I can take the lining off I have to take the painting off of the stretcher and so I'm just removing these old nails and tacks from the stretcher. I'll set the stretcher aside for cleaning later, but now I'll remove anything I find like a small label, and any of the grime that's built up behind the painting. So I'm gonna start peeling this canvas back and luckily this old adhesive, which is a rabbit skin glue, has deteriorated and is no longer really providing a strong bond. Sometimes it's completely deteriorated and the lining canvas pulls right off and sometimes you have to work a little bit harder or use moisture, but I don't want to use moisture at this step because I'm gonna have to use it later and I want to limit the amount of exposure the painting has to moisture because of course the canvas is going to absorb that moisture and it's going to start deforming, and as you can see in this case, I really don't need to use moisture. I can just peel the old lining canvas right off. Where necessary I can use a scalpel and I can shave off those pieces of canvas, revealing the glue layer and the original canvas. Scraping can be a lot of fun. It can also be really infuriating and it's best to do small sections every day and then set it aside. So with all of the old lining canvas removed, I have the original canvas and the glue. Now I'm using a laponite mixture, which is a synthetic clay mixture with water, and I'm gonna paint it on the back of the canvas and what its gonna do is it's going to allow the old rabbit skin glue to swell to absorb some of that moisture and allow me to scrape it off. Now I'm taking a scalpel and I'm dulling it because I don't want a razor sharp blade. Because I'm gonna be moving across the back of the canvas, I don't want to take the chance that either my scalpel slips, or it jumps, or that there's a knot or something in the canvas that gets caught on the blade and then gets cut. So using the dull scalpel I'm just gonna start going across the surface with almost no pressure, really just allowing the weight of the blade and of my hand to guide it. And as you can see the rabbit skin glue has swelled and become soft enough that I can scrape it with really almost no effort. And that's not to say that this doesn't take a tremendous amount of care and attention, but unlike some of the other adhesives that require a tremendous amount of labour and and hard work, this rabbit skin glue comes off pretty easily, and as we can see the canvas is in really great condition. So this is an exceptionally fun one to work on because the canvas is really strong. There don't appear to be any tears or damage that would warrant any lining, and the rabbit skin glue layer is coming off with relative ease. Again, I'll work a little bit on one section, and then I'll put it away for a day and then come back the next day and work on it, mostly just so that I'm fresh and focused, because it's a lot of surface area to scrape and it can get monotonous and the best way to make sure that there's no damage or that there isn't even the chance of damage is to always be working fresh. And the reason I didn't apply water directly to the back of the canvas is because it would have - not only would the rabbit skin glue have absorb the water, but the canvas would have as well and it would have deformed tremendously. And so you can see all of that rabbit skin glue is removed, there's still some residue that all remove it in a later step. But in order to do that, we have to take off the facing. So this adhesive that I used for the facing is a conservation grade, heat-activated, solvent-activated removable adhesive, and in this case I'm just applying the appropriate solvent, letting it sit and soften up the adhesive and then I can peel back this mulberry paper. So you can see the adhesive on the surface and that will get removed later with some cotton swabs. This is really beautiful paper and it's used in printmaking and other fine arts all the time, and every time I apply it to the painting and I have to take it off, I feel really bad because it's such a gorgeous material, but of course, I know that without this material and without that sacrifice perhaps the painting wouldn't have been cared for as well and wouldn't have been as protected. In addition to conforming to the surface of the painting better, these smaller sheets are easier to remove. So I'm removing some of the residue and we can see that we have no paint loss which is exactly what we wanted. In addition, we have no paint damage, which is the whole point of facing a painting. Now the next step is going to be something called a vapor treatment, where I'm using moisture, heat, and pressure to do two things. First, I'm going to be drawing out all of the excess rabbit-skin glue, and secondly, I'm going to be flattening and smoothing out the canvas because there are some waves and some ripples, partially from the old conservation and from the exposure to the labonite. So using my hot table, which is a large aluminum table with heating elements embedded underneath, I'm going to create an envelope with the painting sitting on a release layer and an absorbent cotton blotter, surrounded by cotton webbing, and covered with PET film. I'm going to adhere that film to the surface of the painting, and then I'm going to turn on the vacuum pump that I'm going to begin sucking out the air, and the table is going to start to heat up, and it's going to heat up to about 95 to 100 degrees for this painting. This table can go all the way up to 400 degrees, but that would never be used because that would damage the painting. So I'm going to heat the table up, suck out the air, and apply pressure to the painting. This pressure, combined with the moisture that was applied to the painting earlier and the heat, is going to relax the canvas fibers and it's going to allow me to set the painting into a new flat state. The painting will go under weights and new blotter papers for several days, and once it comes out it will be flat and smooth and all of the rabbit skin glue adhesive will be fully removed. Now the next step is to add a new tacking edge to the painting because the original tacking edge was removed during the last conservation. So I'm using Belgian linen and I'm fraying the edge because it does two things. One, it allows for more surface area to contact the adhesive, and it ensures that there's not a crisp rigid line that could potentially impress to the front of the painting. Now I'm using an adhesive film that's going to be applied to the edge of the painting with an iron and then I'm going to iron the New Belgian linen tacking edge to that adhesive film. Now, I'm using very low heat, does not take a lot, and I'm making sure that there's a high concentration of adhesive film along the edge because I want to make sure that there's a really good bond. So again, not a lot of heat, moving over the area that needs to be bonded, I'll then place a steel weight on top of that area so that as the canvas is cool they don't deform. Because of course even though they're not wet there's still ambient moisture in the canvas and as that gets heated up it will soften the canvas and expand and then when it dries it will contract. Now an unexciting part of the conservation process is cleaning off the old stretchers. In this case there was some paper tape that needed to be removed, and so that had to get softened with water and scraped off. While this isn't sexy or exciting, it's important because it's my job to make sure that all of the painting, including the support is well cared for, but it also affords me some time with the support where I can examine it and make sure that there's no damage that needs to be repaired. So I'm going to square up the stretcher and then I'm going to secure it in place with two small nails. And these are going to help make sure that the stretcher doesn't deform or go out of square as I work with it. I'll remove these nails later. Don't worry. So the first step is fitting the painting to the stretcher and then applying some tacks to the center point of each end. And the reason that I do this is because it's always easier to move from the center out, maintaining pressure along the canvas If there are waves or ripples or excess slack that needs to be removed from the canvas, I can do so at the corners. Now I'll tuck the corners in, I'll apply a couple more tacks just to make sure that they're held in place. If I would start at the edge of the canvas and work towards the other edge I might end up accidentally trapping a ripple or a wave in the canvas and that's incredibly difficult to remove later. So I'll take this excess tacking edge and I'll fold it over and, using a lighter weight tack, I will adhere it to the back of the stretcher bar. Now luckily I have some of the original keys, so I have a model from which I can use. I'm going to take a similar piece of oak and I'm going to cut it to match the originals. Now sometimes when I don't have an original key or the same material I will have to create new keys, but whenever possible I try to use similar materials, not only for appearance, but it kind of honors the artist's original intent a little better. Now those holes will come into play later when I secure the keys into place. These keys are essential because they allow me to add tension to the painting. The joints are not glued or nailed and when the key is hammered in, it expands that stretcher, adding tension to the canvas and canvases need to be under a certain amount of tension so that they don't deform. Here you can see that those holes are used to add fishing line and another tack. This is just gonna make sure that these keys don't get lost. And if they ever come loose, they won't fall down in between the canvas and the stretcher bar and create a bulge. So at this point, I need to fill in the area of paint loss. Now luckily on this painting there's almost no retouching that needs to be done, but we do have that one spot. So I'm filling it in with a calcium carbonate or chalk mixture and I'm gonna overfill and then remove the excess later. So unlike the previous attempt, I want to make sure that I get all of this fill-in medium off except where the paint was lost. I don't want to overdo it and just kind of flatten it and blend it in, that's just not the way that it gets done. Only where the paint loss is does the fill-in medium rest This is one of those times where having gloves on really isn't helpful because I need the sensitivity of a bare finger to feel if the fill-in medium is level. So now I'm going to be applying an isolation varnish. And this is an ultraviolet stable, fully reversible synthetic resin varnish that is applied to the painting before any retouching. There are two reasons that this is going to be applied. One, I want to make sure that my retouching is separate from the original painting so that if it ever needs to be removed it can be, but two that varnish is going to allow the colors to take on the appearance that they will when the final varnish is applied, and that's really important because sometimes paintings get washed out or dry or they just don't appear as lively as they will when the varnish is applied, and I need to make sure that I'm retouching to the final appearance, not what exists in front of me, because if I retouch to the dried-out lighter colors, then when I apply the final varnish, my retouching is going to look different. So for retouching I use a conservation pigment by the Maimeri Company called a Restauro and it is pigment suspended in mastic resin as opposed to oil, and what this allows is for this paint to be removed at a later date if ever the need arises. So I'm just going through and touching up the little areas of damage and paint loss that I find and this is where there's kind of a judgment call between the conservator and the client. It's really important for me to understand what my client wants and expects out of this conservation so that I can deliver that retouching for them. Some clients want no retouching. They don't care about the damage. In fact, some of them like the damage, and then some others want to see absolutely no damage whatsoever. Most of my clients generally drift towards wanting to see no damage, but there's a fine line between being excessive and over retouching, and just retouching what's necessary so that the viewer can appreciate the artist's vision. I take my cues from the painting itself. And this is a relatively small painting, it's about 25 by 30 or so, and it would be viewed from maybe three feet, four feet away. And so when I sit at my easel about three feet away from the painting, anything that I see that becomes a distraction I will consider for retouching. If it only becomes a distraction at 6 or 8 inches away, I'm not going to worry about it. Now a lot of people ask what's the secret to retouching and color matching, and, unfortunately, there is no secret. It's just practice, practice, practice and over time, as you retouch more, you become more familiar with colors and how they're made and how they work, and with your own palette. So you have a better understanding of the color you're trying to match and you have a better understanding of how to get there using the pigments available to you. So in this case, I'll see this color and I will see it not only as this kind of grayish, greenish, mushy brown color, but I'll see it as a combination of black, white, brown madder alazarin, a little bit of cadmium yellow, maybe even a little bit of cadmium orange medium, and so using those colors, I can match my paints to the original color. Sometimes having less paints is also really helpful. If you have a palette of 50 different colors You can get overwhelmed and start throwing every little color in there when really you only need about five or six paints to match any color, at least historic colors. Some of the more modern colors are a little bit more difficult to work with. Things like fluorescents, but there are different paint sets and color palettes that can achieve that as well. And so you can see I'm not mixing one flat color and applying it over I'm mixing kind of three or four colors and I'm dotting them over the damage, and what that's going to do is kind of camouflage that retouching away so that your eye doesn't see it as a kind of new blotch on the painting. So now it's time for the final varnish, and this is the same synthetic resin that I applied to the painting as an isolation layer, but in this case I'm spraying it on, for if I brushed it on as I did the first one, it would reactivate the isolation layer and it would peel up that layer plus my retouching. For years, when clients used to bring paintings to me and ask about their frames, I would refer them to frame conservators that I knew who specialized in this work. I had no real interest in working with frames and I also felt that frames were okay with a patina. Well, those frame conservators have since closed up shop or are no longer doing this work and I've also been a little bit enlightened and we're never too old to learn new things. And so I will have to own up to being wrong about frames in the past. They don't necessarily have a patina on them. In fact, in this case, it was just a really dirty frame, which makes sense because all of what was on the painting was also on the frame. So using an enzyme cleaner, I'm able to disturb and break up that surface grime which in this case is dust, it's dirt, and it is a lot of tobacco smoke. In fact, the whole studio started to smell when I was cleaning this painting. So I'm just going to work in and around the painting, in and around the texture, trying to break up that grime and remove it, and as you can see there's really some beautiful gold leaf and bole underneath. Now there were a couple of spots of damage, and so those were filled in and here I'm applying a new bole, which is clay and, in this case, a synthetic binder, and this is going to provide the undercoat on top of which the gold leaf is going to be applied. Now bole comes in many different colors. You can make your own. In this case it's red because the original is red. Now here I'm using an oil-based size because I want a very strong bond with this gold leaf because I'm gonna have to distress it. You can use a water-based size, but for this purpose the oil is going to be superior. And these little pieces of gold leaf were saved from a previous conservation and rather than throwing them away, I can use them to touch up these small areas It is gold after all, and you don't want to throw any of it away because the price adds up. So the gold will stick to the size and as the size fully dries it will create a really good bond. I'll then tamp it down with a soft brush and remove any excess, and then I can begin toning and tinting it. Now I'm using pigment dyes in Shellac, and I'm gonna mix them all together and come up with a color, a tint, a glaze that I think is going to best mimic what's on the painting right now. And the nice thing about shellac is that I can apply it many many times so if I need to build up the color I can. If I need to remove it, I can also do that because it's not permanent. So after I've applied the size I'll apply some pumice and some rotten stone to achieve an aged, worn look, and that's going to do a pretty good job of blending it in. So at this point the painting is cleaned, it's been conserved, the old work that was unnecessary was fully removed, the frame has been cleaned and conserved, and now I can put them back together. So I'm not using nails, I'm using brackets because they're gonna hold the painting better, and I'm going to be applying a piece of acid free foam core to the back of the painting for a couple of reasons. One, it's going to protect the back from incidental damage, and two, it's going to create an air pocket so that as the painting is handled there's less movement of the canvas and less chance that any cracks appear. I put my label on the back so people can contact me if they have any questions about the work that was done, and now the conservation is complete. So this was a fun one. The painting wasn't really all that damaged but there were rooms for improvement. Obviously cleaning the painting and the frame make a huge difference, but removing that old retouching and that unnecessary lining is also really important, because they have no business being on the painting, particularly that old lining. It didn't really serve any purpose and it was just excessive. It's too bad the original tacking edges were lost but so it goes and as you can see Some of the delicate brushwork and colors were revealed on the coat that were obscured by the old varnish. So, thanks for watching. I hope you've enjoyed. As always, you can subscribe and stay tuned for more videos, you can find me on Instagram where there's a little bit more granular view of what happens at the studio, and If you have any questions, post them in the comments, and I'll do my best to answer.
A new Baumgartner video, a new upvote.
I am absolutely in love with this guy. He is fantastic. I don’t even like paintings, and I watched his every video. True master he is, such a joy to watch!
I wish I had an old painting in need of conservation ;(
The podcast "99% Invisible" is about art conservation this week and is very interesting, for anyone who liked this.
I watch many of these, but this one was particularly painstaking. What a beautiful work.
What about the nail showing through the wood at 22:04?
The whole time I was watching I kept expecting a random dickbutt to be revealed or the conservator to step away and reveal this guy.
Damn April 1st shenanigans get me even when they're not there.
That was great, thanks for sharing.
He's got this Joe from the show You vibe.