Van Gogh: Techniques and Methods

thank you for joining us today and please join me in welcoming Lydia Steph [Applause] Thank You jasmine and thank you to everybody who came out this morning I was incredibly and sort of unexpectedly dreary day so it was so beautiful this weekend it's hard to believe it was so awful as in this series you've already heard Helen speak about van Gogh's works on paper his drawings Prince washes watercolors last week Katie spoke about the importance of his paintings and where they fit into the progression of art particularly in France before and after Impressionism and Katie also used her lecture to touch on some of the more theoretical aspects as to why Van Gogh was so different from his peers and what made his art so exceptional for the time today since I'm a conservator and not an art historian we are going to go down to not really the microscopic level of what makes Van Gogh's art so interesting and so exceptional but fairly close to it we know that then goes materials in many ways were actually quite traditional however the ways in which in which he used those materials are what makes his work so instantly recognizable and I should say also that I'm taking my cue from Katie and I am NOT going to say his last name at all because I just I can't do it I have tried and tried and I just can't do it I don't have that girl'a thing available so I'm just going to call him Vincent just as Katie did here at the MSA we are fortunate to have six paintings by Vincent that cover almost the entire range of his painting career - the period when he was in Paris in 1886 - 1887 moving I mean I'm sure many of you know these paintings intimately but starting in the upper left corner we have the Weaver from 1884 the postmaster Joseph Rula from 1888 then we have his wife madame roola Orla boxes from 1889 the ravine of 1889 the enclosed filled with Plowman also from 1889 and finally the houses at ovair from the end of towards the end of his life from 1890 today I'll be using as a framework using all six of these paintings as a way to illustrate different points of about Van Gogh's working process and his materials as I'm sure most of you know a traditional oil and canvas painting from the 19th century was composed of a piece of fabric usually most likely made out of lemon because it was the strongest type of fabric available at the time which was attached to some kind of structural support such as a wooden stretcher or strainer with wooden tacks this might be the final stretching because in many instances artists would take their canvases out in the field and attach them to a temporary strainer or a working strainer and then Rees Treach them back in their studios for a more finished and final presentation this fabric the linen would have been sized first with a layer of some kind of animal skin glue and this process served to isolate the linen fibers from the layers of Tyrael that would go on top of it while linen is structurally quite strong the oil and other materials that would have been mixed into the paint could damage the fiber over time and artists had known this for centuries so this layer of sizing would have been placed on the fabric on top of that would have been spread multiple most likely multiple layers of a ground or sometimes called the preparation layer the priming layer that in general was pigments traditionally lead white mixed with linseed oil or other oils these layers after each application would be sanded and smooth before the next application many artists want to bare ground layers to be incredibly smooth so that there was no trace of the fabric there were however other artists who really wanted the feeling of the canvas underneath and often chose not just the sort of plain weave that you think of but other weeds such as a twill weave to give them some texture to work with in their paintings once the preparation was ready the paint layers would have been applied with oil up there were additives that artists would sometimes use in their paints they could add some varnish to the oil paint they could sent it with spirits there are instances of artists adding wax or other products such as this material called Magill that was popular for a while in the 19th century to build up more impasto in their paintings but we know pretty much that vincent's actually stuck with pure oil paint and in the final step in a painting would have been possibly the addition of a varnish code added to the surface so since I plan to describe them since working his materials and his working process starting from that very bottom layer I show you here illustration that helps discuss help me discuss his fabric support the the process of priming canvas of stretch in canvas was laborious and time-consuming so by the 19th century most artists were in fact no longer doing this work themselves and many of them did not have studio assistants that they could pass the job off to either so they would prefer to purchase it prepared from an artist's color Minh as the color shops were known then and here on the left you see a diagram in French of the standard sizes available for artists at the time and they all had these numbers here so that artists could request a canvas size by that particular number and although this diagram is in French it would have been standard for artists color Menaul across the continent and in England one of the nice things about having these standard sizes was that it made it much more economical for artists and particularly if they bought of a bolt of fabric they could figure out quite easily how many of those standard sizes they could fit on there the stretchers and the strainers would also come in those standard sizes and at the end of the working process the frames would also come in standard sizes so it made the whole process both easier and more economical we know a great deal about Vincent's preferences in materials and also his seemingly insatiable and endless need for more materials because of the letters that he wrote to his brother Theo when he lives in urban areas such as Paris he could easily purchase what he needed from any number of color month shops but when he was in rural areas in Holland or later when he was in the south of France in RL it was much more difficult both to find good color Minh and to get exactly the kind of materials that he required so he would order those materials through his brother Theo from afar and given how expensive artists materials were and how dependent he was on his brother to finance his career he was very careful to save and use every bit of fabric or paint or brushes anything that he could on the right here you see a reconstruction an imagination of how one single bolt of fabric that Vincent would have ordered was used and divided up these are the double square paintings that Katie mentioned too discussed last week that he made towards the very end of his life where they were literally an unusual format up to the size of two squares placed side by side and as you can see these paintings are all laid out as we believe that they would have that Vincent would have used the fabric there is a computer program now that has been developed by researchers whereby they can take a very very high-resolution scan of x-rays of things and with this program analyze the the width and thickness and irregularities of the threads in the paintings and by putting them together they can figure out where on a piece of fabric in the paint each painting would have come in relation to the others and this is so complicated that most people don't even understand what they're getting at but it has become very useful for both scholars and conservators to figure out within an artist's body of work where a certain painting might fall if it has a companion piece and it can even help in the authentication process for an artist's work because if the fabric is so different from standard materials that that artist would have used it does raise a red flag in this next image I show here on the left the reverse of this painting of dobie knees garden from 1890 and I love this image it's because it's so unusual for very for several different reasons first and foremost is the fact that the painting has not been lined or glued onto another piece of fabric the lining of paintings onto another piece of fabric or sometimes even onto a solid support such as a wood panel or even in modern times onto aluminum panels has been a traditional technique for centuries and done usually to help preserve the painting as time goes by the linen is weakened from the movement as it changes with the temperature or the relative humidity it might be torn or otherwise damaged as it lives in people's houses or travels or undergoes any kind of potentially dangerous process I have seen things that have had baseballs go through them or have fallen onto lamp finials so there's no end to the paintings the trouble paintings can get into however when a painting is lined onto a new support one of the crucial things that you lose is whatever information might be found on the original reverse of the painting this could include a canvas stamp and inscription information dealers stamps all kinds of things and in many cases though all of that information was not documented before the painting was lined so it is now lost here you also see a very traditional stretcher it has four members here it's a stretcher which means that its corners are expandable as opposed to a strainer where all the corners are fixed and this is preferable because as you can see with these little wedges called keys in the corner as the painting would sort of lose its tension and maybe sag a little bit over time and I think we've all had linen pants that do that at the knees the wedges can be pushed out with a little tack hammer and so as the stretcher enlarges it helps to maintain the fabric at the proper tension the other reason why I really love this image is that you see all of these labels that are attached to the stretcher and although they're impossible to read right now one of the beauties of things like that is it really tells a story it tells the history of a painting where it might have been exhibited who owned it whether it had traveled and as we know from some of our other works in the collection it can also tell us important things about the paintings provenance and whether or not it might have been obtained illegally so these sorts of details on a stretcher are very important it's also obviously the thing that makes it interesting is the type of fabric that was used and if you see these red stripes here they look just like this traditional French dish towel otherwise known as a torchon for the most part at this point in his career in 1890 Vincent was financially better often didn't necessarily need to reuse materials but this happened to have been painted at a time when for whatever reason his brother had been slow to send him the materials that he had asked for and in his need to keep painting he obviously grabbed whatever was at hand and that happened to be a dish towel we know that even in his earlier times Vincent struggled with being able to have enough materials to satisfy his creativity and his needs to keep painting so that in his early days in Holland it was somewhat common for him to reuse canvases and also he did that possibly even a little bit more frequently when he was actually living in Paris typically with those canvases he would scrape down the paint that was already on the surface and possibly even apply a layer of a single color on top of that so that the previous composition would be blotted out by this new layer so that he could be free to pursue a new painting without the distraction of the previous want composition underneath the MFA is very lucky to have a very dramatic example of this reuse of his canvas in May and June of 1889 Vincent undertook a series of landscape paintings including as you can see here in particular the very famous starry night for each of the paintings that he was making van Gogh Vincent sent a very detailed beautiful drawing of that composition to his brother in Paris and I show this diagram that was put together by my colleague made to Siobhan who was here years ago on a Mellon fellowship and did must credit her for doing all of the research on this particular project there is one gaping hole in this diagram and you know helpfully there's a question mark there to point that out and this is for the drawing of wild vegetation in the collection of the van Gogh Museum for years scholars had searched for the location of the missing painting they worried that it has been lost damaged somehow and it was never found in 2007 we happened to the MFA was participating in a research project along with scholars from the Cleveland Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition of Van Gogh's repetitions because our painting of the ravine was being examine to determine if it were the first or second version of the painting Mehta was asked to take a new x-ray of the ravine as you see here because she was incredibly skilled at taking x-rays and the original x-ray was old and also not in a digital format which made it harder to compare and do overlays and other things to compare the two versions of the painting the x-rays that emerged from this experiment was completely unexpected and as you can see bears absolutely no resemblance to the painting that currently sits on the surface this crazy series of all these little circles all over the place there is no hint of that in the composition of the ravine and interestingly enough you also do not see any really of the composition of the ravine showing up in the x-ray so clearly the pigments used in the x-ray here were much more opaque to to the energy of an x-ray meaning they had heavier metal pigments such as lead or any of the cadmium Zoar things like that that would block the x-ray and render the it appeared its appearance like this so fortunately meta at the time she is a Dutch citizen and happened to be visiting friends and colleagues in Holland at the time and showed this x-ray to a curator at the van Gogh Museum who immediately recognized the composition as that of the wild vegetation so here are the drawing and the x-ray side-by-side and you can see how even these mountains up here is just sketched in as they are you see the shape up there and all of this movement of these circles is all translated into paint here and you see this area that appears darker there and it is darker as correspondingly over here in the x-ray it does seem kind of incredible to us but no one had ever made this connection before as scholars had long known that there was some kind of composition underneath the current one and also with the naked eye even in the galleries you can tell that there is something else going on under the upper layers of paint this is a photo micrograph taken of a section in the upper left corner of the painting at high magnification just to give you a sense of this pink color and it doesn't read pink partly because of the color of the light elements of under the microscope but you can see how there is this different layer underneath these very liquid yellow blue and green strokes on top of it however even with the naked eye as I said in the galleries and and I should say I took these pictures in the gallery with my iPhone so it's very impressive what you can do with an iPhone you can see for example a yellow swirl that shows through underneath the paint strokes drawn diagonally across it and even where the strokes below are fully covered up down here you can see sort of the ghost shape of all of those circles coming through the upper layers of paint and here although these are in fact harder to see there are these little pink elements that poke through the original composition the uppermost composition and we know that the predominant colors of the flowers in wild vegetation were pink and yellow and so we can easily see those in there and I urge you to go upstairs and look at the painting yourself to see this and I should just say that as an aside I took my then five-year-old daughter to see it and I said you know there's another painting underneath it and she walked right up to the wall and laid her head against the fabric up there and tried to look behind the painting she so didn't understand the concept of her artists painting one layer on top of the other returning to our discussion of instance materials we should next consider briefly the ground or preparation layer as I mentioned before artists in the 19th century typically no longer prepared their own canvases except in exceptional circumstances and his letters to his brother all confirmed that he purchased his canvas already primed this one exception once again shows that Vincent would occasionally prepare his own canvas and part of how we know this is prepared by hand and not commercially is because of the way the ground shows through on the reverse and the action of scraping the ground down to smooth it out would push it through the fabric onto the reverse and you'll often see that on artists painting he preferred a white or a cream-colored ground although every once in a while he would apply a overall top layer an imprimatur layer of a color on top of the white or cream ground in order to work on some effect he was aiming for one notable thought a fact about Vincent's preparatory layers is the way that he like many of the Impressionists and artists ever since incorporated the tone of the ground layer into the composition itself and as you see here with the enclosed filled with plow man from 1889 here down here you see the ground acting as a lighter layer poking out between these cut-offs stalks there you see how it shows up in the sky and can read as a white streak this detail also shows how Vinson clearly felt no compunction to completely fill the canvas all the way to the edges all along the sides here you see exposed canvas there as well in areas down there and he just used that as part of particularly successfully in the sky and down here you can see there these dabs of color but then these areas of ground mimic the same shape so he could very easily use those tones as part of his composition one of the things that would in many cases come next in the creation of a painting would be the application of some kind of under drawing to the canvas maybe in charcoal pencil and under painting with a very thin wash of some kind of color we know that early in his career when he was just starting to paint Vincent was sketching figures in charcoal and then try and fill in those outlines with his paint but he found this process very unsatisfactory partly because as he went along he lost the drawing through the application of paint and certainly once he began painting in earnest and after he moved to Paris he really abandoned the underdrawing technique as far as we know late in his life when he was making those copies of works by famous painters his copies of Malee's works and others he would use a method to grid to transfer the drawing because he wanted to be as accurate as he possibly could in copying the composition of those already known works but in his own works we don't find that he did that particularly often and it should be noted that was something like charcoal because of the thickness of the paint that Vincent normally applied to his paintings it would be very difficult for us to find any signs of that under drawing on the canvas because in particular examining things with infrared which is our standard technology for looking for under drawing it would not show through that's those pigments as you heard before it took Vincent quite some time to kind of gather up the courage after he had started his training as an artist to begin painting in oils and it was really working with Anton malva who really encouraged him to start painting that got him to finally venture into oil painting in 1881 his earliest oil paintings are quite traditional in technique malva had trained traditionally he passed on a lot of this knowledge to Vincent and so there isn't really anything particularly unusual that you would say about his earliest paintings here in the weaver of 1884 you can see that he was using a very rich medium you can see that the strokes here in particular are quite fluid there's a lot of blending of the paint and smoothing of the paint that goes on in the background and I think the x-ray helps to reinforce this idea particularly you can kind of see almost sort of tied lines of around the brushstrokes here delineating the floorboards because the there would have been enough of a medium so that it was quite liquid and also a lot of scumbling and blending here in the background his paintings in the early 1880s had a very limited palette and as you see in this sketch of his palette that he had in one of his letters to his brother he was content with a very simple palette composed of lead white Naples yellow yellow ochre red ochre burnt sienna raw Sienna either a cobalt or Prussian blue ivory black and vermilion he felt that he could achieve any of the other tones that he might want such as a green or a purple through the mixture of those tones already on his palate occasionally he would write to his brother and ask for a random tube of some brighter color possibly in alizarin red or even occasionally a tube of ultramarine but ultramarine in particular was incredibly expensive and he was so conscious of what Co was spending to send him these materials that he really didn't want to include those more extravagant and expensive pigments this very restricted palette explains why his most famous work from that time the potato eaters of 1885 is so dark and to our modern eyes appears almost monochromatic however even in all of its gloom Vincent was experimenting with the theories about color that he had been studying and as Katie described Vincent was constantly reading and studying and a willing to soak up any ideas that he could get ahold of I show here just briefly to color wheels from some of them were prominent colored theorists of the time on the left is shippo's color wheel on the right the color wheel that appeared in Charles bonks book on color theory what's most fascinated Vincent about these ideas about color theory part of which had come through breakthroughs in the science of optics in the 19th century was this idea of what was called the law of simultaneous contrast which stated that when the primary colors your red your blue and your yellow were placed alongside or near the secondary colors the orange the green and the violet that they would produce a kind of optical vibration and reinforce each other and make each other more vivid it's a little hard to imagine that that's the kind of theory that van Gogh was studying while he was creating dark paintings like the potato eaters however when he wrote to Theo and described this painting he talked about a lot about how for example the red of the woman's cheek here would be set off and vibrating against the green of the jacket or the greenish tonality of the earth pigments so that there would still be some play of these colors just on a very muted and dark scale it was indeed bingos vincent's trip to Amsterdam in 1885 that really opened up his mind and his eyes to the possibility of color he was especially struck as been mentioned before by the vibrancy of the contrasts of blues and oranges that you see here miss orange versus the blue background and in particular here that blue dash against that orange jacket and that you see in these paintings by Franz Hoff it's also possible to see with halt the kind of brush strokes the strong individual brushstrokes that halls used and the kind of effect that they would have how they would strike Vincent when he saw these paintings on his return from that trip the effect on his painting was almost immediate as you can see in these two comparisons the cottage here from 1885 was painted not long before his trip to Amsterdam and the avenue of poplars was painted quite soon after his return and although he isn't immediately exploding into the brilliant colour that we are more familiar with in his paintings you do see suddenly these passages of these spots of bright reds of blue strokes in the sky versus the orange strokes in the trees there is still black and brown and earth tones but nothing like the sort of muddy and muted tonality of the earlier paintings you also see the the use of these more individual brushstrokes how he was more comfortable separating the brushstrokes and not blending them in together whereas up here you see much more blending of The Strokes in the sky there is some hatching there but not nearly as much as you see in the lively and vibrant brushstrokes of the avenue of poplars in 1886 Vincent rather abruptly decided to move to Paris and went to live with his brother Theo Impressionism was in full bloom at the time and artists such as Monet MANET and Duga had all made their mark on the art scene and at the time there were also new artists such as Syrah and seen yak who were introducing new styles neo-impressionism puente lism and i show these examples from our collection because they're artists that van Gogh that vincent would have met but he would have become in the case of Toulouse Lautrec become very good friends with and these are works created more or less around the same time as Vincent Vincent's arrival in Paris as you can see from these examples the typical palette of the Impressionists contain very few of the darker pigments the earth tones that Vincent was still including in his paintings and was quite fond of and you see here the contrast of the oranges with the Blues the greens and the Reds that was a hallmark particularly of the paintings of Monet and the other Impressionists and one other thing that was important for Vincent to see in these works was the matte surface quality of the painters the paintings that you would have seen in Paris even though the de got here is a pastel that kind of more matte surface was increasingly important to artists at the time as you see in this illustration the typical palette of the impressionist at the time was much brighter and more pure than had been in the past and this slide is a little deceptive because the squares painted out look much darker than they are but the only real dark pigment here is the ivory black down here in the corner research and analysis on impressionist paintings show that this is quite typical of the types of paints that artists would use the lead white and the zinc white chrome yellows of various hues cadmium yellow had also become available at the time Naples yellow alizarin crimson the natural matters there and then you would have vermilion and another orange chrome pigment for the greens there were the sealers green the the emerald green Viridian chrome green and many of these were also new pigments because chrome had been discovered by in the chemical industry and so had emerald which was an arsenic based pigment down at the bottom you find for the Blues you find cerulean blue which is a cobalt pigment pure COBOL and then the artificial ultramarine but even though it was an artificial pigment it was still more expensive than certainly than the cobalt pigments were in Paris Vincent sucked up really everything he could from the art world he visited museums and galleries he took classes in the studio of an artist named renowned korma and became friends with such artists as Toulouse Lautrec and Emile Bernard he certainly wasn't about to call himself an impressionist at that time and initially wasn't even sure he particularly liked impressionist paintings the effects on his paintings were just from having been in that environment and seeing that art were very clear the MFA as I mentioned before unfortunately it doesn't have a painting from that period so I am showing here an example from the van Gogh Museum the banks of the sin from 1887 on the bottom and here at the top is one of our sea sleeves from 1884 and you can see how much has changed for Vincent the the kind of the sharp perspective of the landscape may be betraying a little bit of the influence of Japanese art and their use of very strong and unusual perspective and in particular the use of the strong strokes of complementary colors and you can see these pure blues down here the pure oranges and how the reflection is so differentiated from the water itself there the red of the fence there contrasting against The Strokes of green in the trees Vincent's fascination with the use of these strokes of complementary colors was such that he even went so far as to purchase these balls of wool and more skeins of wool that he would organize both in balls of pure color as you see there these pure orange tones and then he would also take strands of the yarn from the skeins and wind them together to study the effects for example of the blue against the orange there and I have to say this is just one of my favorite things about Vincent van Gogh but he would have this box filled with yarn I love this this came down through his family and his house at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam this next image the red cabbage and onions is almost as if you took those balls of yarn and just glued them to a canvas you see just look you see the individual strokes and and how they almost as he uses the strokes to describe the shape of the cabbages and the onions it really does kind of look like a ball of wool because they are so individual each of those strokes and once again the contrast of the orange with the green the blue and the red and even in the shadows there you see the purple strokes against the blues you see him working all the time to see what effect he could get from the placement of these colors next to each other and this effect is also course enhanced by the brushwork itself and you see areas up here where you can you can just sense the movement of his hand with the brush as he made those strokes both vertically and horizontally with a wet paint over what was most likely a dry paint because those strokes are so individual and of course it is the handling of paint those brushstrokes that Vincent is so famous for I I love this picture of one of his palace also in the collection of the van Gogh Museum because you see so much of what happened what ended up on the paint on the canvas started off on his palette you can see how he dug into the thick paint that he would have applied to his palette with his brush and moved it around here there is some blending of colors that is on mixed into those strokes but often it is just simply a pure color there and it's a perfect illustration as well of those complementary colors the green playing against the Reds the blue here mixed contrasting with the yellow it's almost a complete composition in itself this palette as far as we know from analysis that has been done on many of his paintings since he used basically just the oil medium for his paints and he might have used some spirits some turpentine to senate when he felt that was necessary but he didn't tend to add other bulking agents or mcgill or things like that to his paint under the influence of his friend Toulouse Lautrec he did experiment briefly while he was in Paris with a technique called pen to on this Hall which means the paint's were drained of as much of their oil as possible and then thinned down to a great degree with turpentine it would give it an incredibly matte appearance and thinking of the work of Toulouse Lautrec that makes absolute sense because his paintings are very matte and chalky in appearance and here in the still life with lemons you can see just how I mean it really almost looks like a gouache even though it is an oil painting because it is so dry except for a few somewhat juicier strokes of paint right there in the bowl and in certain areas but certainly in the areas delineating the lemon it's it's almost like a watercolor technique there however this experiment did not seem to work out particularly well it's not that it doesn't work out well I just don't think it was particularly interested in pursuing this Avenue and in this next example the portrait of Joseph Rula also known as the postman from 1888 shows us many of the different ways that Vincennes could and did apply paint to canvas in the background for example you see a mostly quite flat color but looking closely there is a grid pattern almost a sort of a woven pattern that he frequently did when applying larger areas of a mostly flat color where there was no design or pattern to distract the eye here in these details you can also see for example here in this detail of his knee you see the brush work is the paint is fairly thin and so you get some sense of the ground or else the background color poking through the blue paint paint there it's also fairly unmodulated and fairly flat he didn't create the form through using different shades of the blue but rather use these much darker strokes of a pure dark blue to draw really essentially draw on the form in this detail around the hand up here once again you see these quite fins washing strokes of the green they're on this in the shadowy areas of the table and then a much thicker wetter paint used on the tabletop and again as down here these very strong outlines of dark color to create the form with the hand here you you get a sense of him building up the form of the hand with the different strokes laid on top of each other and this highlight you see of the pinky is just one long stroke that goes along the top of the hand the shadows once again often done towards the end of the painting process of that hand because as you can see it goes over the already dried paint these darker colors use to create delineate the shadows and then finally some of the highlights up here also applied after the paint had been dry and of course if you look closely at his beard there are so many strokes of complementary colors it's almost as if there's this sort of furry thing on his face because it's so vivid and it seems to be moving and you see once again you know the orange strokes and the green strokes from the green and orange constantly playing off each other even as in this instance they are more muted because obviously in this instance he was making a portrait of a friend and did not want to give him a pure orange and green beard and finally you can see how in the face he uses these rich strokes of color to block in the fore and that stroke showing the tip of the post man's nose there and then these very dry sharp strokes for the eyebrow up there from the following year we have our portrait of madame roola the post man's wife also known as loved ephesus and here you see even more play of the contrasting colors you have the bright green of the skirt which is quite Finley painted with a first layer with sort of a blue-green a cool icy green color of I believe it is Viridian mixed with white with yellow er greener strokes laid in on top of it contrasting unbelievably vibrantly with the red of the floor and the reddish tone of the chair you can also see how it is repeated throughout the painting in the background as well and in some of these details you see once again from my iPhone you can see how this smooth thin green background greenish blue background is contrasted with these really strong dabs of orange red paint and then these finally be circles of blue added all over Vincent even carried out the play of the contrast of the red and green here in Madame Lula's eyeball artist traditionally with portraits I'm sure you've all noticed how in the corner of the eye artists traditionally put of a spot to give it a very natural appearance because we all have that in the corners of our eyes but you can see this very bright reds and the contrast the sort of almost demonic contrast that it makes with the pure green of her iris there Vincent's use of color and the amount of paint in this painting really is quite extreme but contrast between the flatness of the red floor compared to what you see in these details of her face where the paint just seems to be added layer after layer until it comin eighths in this crust almost of paint on her forehead and in parts of her hair and over here you can see how originally much of the form was made with these horizontal and diagonal strokes to kind of give a sense of the shape of the forehead but in the final layers he drew these very thick strokes of almost pure color straight down across her forehead there and they're quite crusty it's difficult to judge whether or not the full quality of this surface has been compromised over the year many times in the lining process with paintings the thickness and the three-dimensional quality of the impasto of paint can become flattened particularly in earlier centuries when there was a great deal of heat and moisture used in the lining process we do find instances where the paint has been somewhat flattened by lining painting paint could also have been flattened by artists when they were transporting paintings when the paint might have been somewhat wet and painting four stacked on top of each other we also see that occurring so it's not entirely possible to know if this is in fact the original appearance of madame roola forehead and in fact the rest of the impasto in the painting but at least you get a very strong sense of the really three dimensionality of the paint there our portrait of madame roola also illustrates sort of the pleasures and the pitfalls of chemistry and what happened to artist materials in the nineteenth century there was an explosion of new materials being created in the 19th century and in particular for artists materials growing out of the textile dyeing industry when they finally were able to make synthetic dyes that mimicked and actually often improved on the natural dyes that had been available before hand many of the colors that we associate with modern painters with the Impressionists in particular were new pigments at the time the chrome containing pigments the cobalt containing pigments and the synthetic Lake pigments such as geranium Lake which was one of them some absolute favorite tones it was a very intense rich red color however it was known even at the time by artists that many of these pigments could potentially discolor over time and the lake pigments in particular were known to be fugitive but artists didn't seem to care and in fact Vincennes wrote to his brother at one point saying that he had found a solution for how to prevent the geranium lake from fading however we know that that is not in fact the case some of these details from madame roola show the these flowers in the background they are very pale pink however in this image which you've seen before of the comparison of the five versions of this painting it is the crueler Muller version is believed to be the original partly because of the freeway in which the P the flowers in the background were painted in at one of his letters Vincent described them as bright pink dahlias and as you can see in all five versions the flowers range from a very pale pink to basically white including in ours and we did some analysis some micro analysis of the pigments in this painting and we do find traces of the chemical ESN which is the component of that geranium lake so we can only assume that the painting would in fact have had these bright pink flowers playing off of that Bluegreen background in this next example the bedroom also from the van Gogh Museum shows is an illustration of an even more extreme problem with this fugitive geranium lake he loved so much Vincent described this painting in great detail to both his brother and other family members because he painted other versions of his painting to send to his family to show them what his bedroom looked like as he wrote the Theo he said quote this time it's simply my bedroom but the color has to do the job here and through its being simplified by giving a grander style to things to be suggestive here of rest or asleep in general he then goes on in the letter to detail the colors used in various parts of the room among them the walls are of a pale violet the floor is of red tiles and the doors are lilac of course looking at the painting now where where is the violet where are the red tiles and where are the lilac doors I should say that as conservators we are frequently asked if we would ever consider reconstructing or replacing missing elements in a painting especially when it comes to either faded or degraded pigments or glazes and the answer is essentially almost always absolutely not but thanks to the wonders of Photoshop you can digitally alter an image to try and get as the researchers at the van Gogh museum did to try and restore the painting to its original appearance you can see how the change in the color gives a very different feel to the room the come to the reds that vibrant red floor the contrast of the purple walls and the yellow bed it just I personally don't find it particularly restful but maybe it was for Vincent and I should say that with any of these reconstructions without say even for example a strip of the original unaltered paint along the edge we have no real way of knowing how far to take these reconstructions so it might have been this vibrant or it might not have but at least it gives you a sense of what has happened to many of his paintings over time the final stage for an artist in working on a painting is the application of some kind of a surface coating before the invention of the synthetic resins the plastics in the 20th century artists choices for varnishes were basically limited to natural materials tree resins and guns mixed in with spirits to dissolve them or something such as egg white which was used often as a temporary varnish these guns and resins they are secretions of trees and insects they often contain bits of tree or insect in them they emerge from the tree already somewhat discolored and give them the purity of lack of purity of solvents at that time the varnish itself would never have been completely clear would never been crystal clear in the way we would expect it to be in this day and age so artists knew well that applying a layer of varnish would already somewhat slightly alter their appearance and everyone knew about the effects of the aging process and the yellowing of these resins over time Vincent in his earlier years and I show you once again the Weaver from 1884 knew that darker more oil-rich colors would turn matte or somewhat chalky in the darker areas of the painting and most likely varnished at least some of these earlier works in one of his letters to see oh he wrote that the paintings he was sending to Theo in Paris should be gone over quote with the white of an egg in about a week or some varnish in a month time to lift them and to prevent those darks from going chalky or matte in our example here of the Weaver you see how glossy the surfaces you see with the darks here how you can still make out the D tails they are saturated and the surface has a quite rich quality to it we are assuming that this is how Vincent would have wanted the surface to look but we don't really know for sure and it's important to note that this painting like most paintings of a certain age has probably been varnished cleaned and varnished again on multiple occasions so what is currently on the surface is very unlikely to have been Vincent's original varnish but rather an interpretation done at the time of its application of what the conservator at the time would have thought the surface should look like like so many of the Impressionists and artists afterwards Vincent came to prefer a much more matte surface which would be achieved by leaving the paint surface unvarnished after it was completed basically from the time of his experiments with the pantry of Alice salt and those extremely matte dry surfaces Vincent chose to leave his surfaces free of varnish and was definitely opposed to the kinds of discoloration that a varnish on the surface would have given them the problem for Vincent and for so many of the painters particularly in that transitional time when artists were first stopping the use of varnish on their paintings was that dealers felt that the general public would not understand a painting that wasn't varnished or would not purchase more importantly a painting that hadn't been varnished and that didn't conform to standards of appearance for paintings for time so even though some artists such as Pissarro actually wrote on the back of their canvases please do not varnish this picture , see Pissarro a dealers would go ahead and varnish them so we we struggle with the appearance of these paintings here now you see our houses that ovair a very late painting 1890 close to the end of Vincent's life and it's really a perfect example of how a varnish layer can alter a painting I don't know if any of you saw the very beautiful Van Gogh and nature show at the Clark Art Institute at Williamstown this summer but this painting given its late place in Van Gogh's career hung very close to the exit in a room with other landscapes and it really stood out for me in that last room and not in a good way because when you looked at it after having walked through an entire exhibition of Vincent's paintings and looking at the types of surfaces there you couldn't help but be struck walking into that room by how glossy and almost gloopy expects even a word our painting looked in comparison to the other paintings and I know other people had also mentioned this this act in when seeing it in that exhibition if you compare our houses that over here on the left with a view of ovair painted at the same time you can see just how extremely different our painting looks from this I should say it's often very difficult to capture surface effects of saturation and varnish in a digital image projected onto a screen and I have probably stacked the deck a little bit here by showing a very matte painting on the right but I just wanted to reinforce the fact that our painting does not look how it ought to look it has had multiple layers of varnish applied to it over the years including a synthetic layer which while it might be clearer in color often because it is essentially a plastic resin can impart a certain plastic quality to the surface so one thing one last thing that I wanted to mention in relation to this very topic is that in the course of this coming year my colleague Irene carnival and I will actually be treating these two paintings the enclosed filled with Plowman and the houses that ovair in an attempt to try and return those paintings to something more closely approximating what we think should have been the original surface of these paintings we were not entirely sure but there is a chance that we will carry out some of this work in the conservation and action space in gallery 208 on the second floor so if that is in fact the case we hope that you will come by and not knock on the glass but you know just at least observe us as we are working on them and I would really strongly encourage all of you to go up to the impressionist gallery when you have the chance to look at the three of our van Gogh's currently hanging there's Madame lebec says the ravine and thank you so because I really feel that you know obviously no digital image projected on a screen can give a sense of the richness and the liveliness of Van Gogh's surfaces and it's something you really have to stand not too close because you'll get in trouble but close enough to to really fully appreciate how how Vincent's it came to achieve those amazing effects that he had in his paintings thank [Applause] so we have time for a few questions we ask that those of you that are leaving now please do so quietly so we can proceed with the Q&A if you have a question please raise your hand we'll bring the microphone to you when you painting outside and he does the painting very quickly how did he avoid getting mud because you know he didn't have time for colors to dry and then put something else on top of that there is there's a lot of debate about how much of the painting for any of the impressionist artists really how much of the painting was done actually outdoors and how much was done in the studio many artists would start a composition outdoors and finish it off in the studio precisely to avoid some of those problems oftentimes we do find a bit of stuff stuck in the paint layers you will find twigs you will find leaves because the paint was still so fresh while painting out there I think the kind of instance could also keep his strokes so separate help to maintain the purity of the color while he was working and as you can see from the self-portraits that I showed in my very first slide he had a handful of brushes in there and I imagined he would use a separate one for each of the colors that he was using so is not to get those muddy tones at the beginning of the lecture you talked about stretchers and strainers and was he painting outdoors on stretched canvas or and I'm looking at this painting with a little bit of the canvas showing or because I know in one of the letters it mentions that he sends them to tio and he asked to have them all stretched and framed and I was surprised to say stretched and framed because I I had always thought he was painting on stretched canvas I think many times he would temporarily stretch them to work outdoors or there are some instances where you see holes in the canvases where he might have tacked it to either a frame or a board then oftentimes he would in fact have to if he did it himself have to restructure once he got it back to the studio and we know in some of his paintings you see the impression of fabric on the wet impasto from other paintings so that opens up the possibility that the canvas while it was still wet would have possibly not been on a full stretcher which has a certain thickness to it so that it wouldn't necessarily have been able to touch another canvas we also see the holes and circles artists use spacers sometimes corks and nails to separate their wet canvases as they transported them so those could have been on boards or stretchers or strainers even while he was working outdoors a strainer is the same shape as a stretcher but it's just that the corners are nailed together so there's no ability to expand them in any way at that time when artists would typically draw the picture on paper or vellum and then they would trace it on to their final status understated paint so is there evidence that when we did that or we have no evidence at all there are some some of his paintings where you can see he would sometimes use a perspective frame that would have lines on it that would help him in the boat to understand the perspective and to give him a framework for copying the composition there are some paintings particularly from the Paris era where you can see the the outlines of that frame coming through the paint because it's fairly thinly done in a period after that after he moved to the south of France it's very difficult to know how he would transfer compositions how he made his repetitions because they're clearly not traced because if you overlay for example the five figures of madame roola they do not completely match up so that they wouldn't have been traced but he must have used some means of duplicating the compositions there we do know that he did use under drawings for his copies of the paintings by me lay and other artists that he made in the beliefs 1890 thank you I was just wondering in these two paintings if he didn't add that top layer of gloss what was it added by owners dealers and in Harley heaven yes it's so hard it's so hard to know we here at the MFA were actually quite blessed to have had a curator who in the period of the certainly starting in the 1940s kept very complete records of treatments so that anything that would have been treated at that time would have been well documented but for things that either came into the collection before then passed through many hands if it's really impossible to know when a surface coating might have been added or added and then removed and added again so sometimes we can tell for example if it's a synthetic material that tells us that it was certainly absolutely not added in Vincent's lifetime but other than that it can be very difficult to get any sense of when that might have happened do we know the length of time it had taken then go to paint on one of these pieces you know I think it varied quite considerably there were paintings that he would write to Co that he completed in a day but other paintings we know that he would take longer he'd need time to allow the lower layers to dry you simply get a sense from reading the letters that he and you know whatever it was that was the form of mental illness that he had I think led him to often work in occasionally in a quite frenzied fashion so I think there's a really wide variety of length of time that it took him to create his paintings and he didn't tend to work on a very large scale so that I think that meant that he could make a lot more progress on his paintings faster because he wasn't trying to cover enormous yards a whole lot of yardage of fabric my question is how have colors changed over time or what what's the thinking about that from what you would have used originally to what the paintings look like now well we have the problem with the fading of the lake pigments and we find that actually in paintings going back centuries because artists has always been aware of the fact that those Lake pigments are not light fast there is a known unknown fact that some of the chrome the yellow chrome pigments that he used have discolored it's difficult to gauge the extent of the discoloration particularly in the sunflowers where you see variations in the yellow color and there is a you know often some indication possibly along attacking margins or areas that have been covered up by the frame where you might see a slightly different tone but since for example with those paintings they are primarily painted with that chrome yellow the amount of fading or discoloration in relation to the other parts of the paintings is unknown which I think why people don't go crazy with the Photoshop and try and reconstruct what those paintings in particular might have looked at looked like how do you reboot the surface garnish without damaging the underlying pigment well for example with the synthetic varnish that is on top the top layer of the houses that ovair the solvents that will soluble eyes synthetic varnish do not affect oil paint at all and in general artists were very careful that the materials they knew that for the most part with a sound healthy oil paint film that even the solvents used to remove a natural resin shouldn't if handle properly affect the oil paint it's a different story if for example artists actually mixed varnish in with their paints which creates a very difficult and frightening situation for the conservator trying to deal with these things we also don't know the effects of previous treatments on these paintings there is there can be times when the paint has been affected by a previous treatment and maybe is more sensitive to solvent than it might have been originally so we have to be very very careful and tests really test the solvents and see what kind of effect we get especially since the goal here as it was for example with both the postman and his wife where the varnish was removed and no varnish was replaced on the surface in an attempt to try and recreate more or less that original more matte appearance that is our aim here as well we need to proceed as cautiously as we can so that we leave the paint look suitably Matt but intact and undamaged so that is that is the challenge that we have working with these two paintings this will be our last question Oh how many layers do you think are on those paintings and and it's just me are you trained to see that learning because I never noticed it oh well yes I am well you know it's with these two paintings it's actually a very different situation because there is at least most likely on the houses that oh they're either a full layer of remnants of natural resin varnish but on top of it there is a synthetic varnish would be enclosed filled with Plowman it is primarily a natural resin varnish that has turned quite yellow quite discolored particularly in the valleys of the impasto is where you see it and that really kind of deaden the look of the brushwork but I wish I could tell you that you could go quickly take a look at this and see this for yourself how kind of overly glossy it looks but since they're up in the conservation studio right now I I can't I can't say that but look for them to look suitably matte when they reappear in the galleries in about a year's time thank you you

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 418,927

Keywords: van gogh, painting, art, art history, dutch art, european art, technique

Id: mgxHvV9-liA

Length: 87min 3sec (5223 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2016