What Lies Beneath - Conserving Prince George - Episode 1

this video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business for this three-part video series we're going to be taking an in-depth look at the conservation of a large portrait painting by the scottish artist thomas murray and unlike some videos where i start right in with the work i wanted to take an opportunity to show you some of the work that happens before the work that is all that goes into a painting's conservation before any tools are touched and any materials are altered this oil on canvas is fairly large measuring roughly 50 inches vertical by 40 inches horizontal and it's a portrait of prince george of hesse dahmerstadt a region in central germany whose largest city is frankfurt and this is a fairly regal portrait showcasing the prince in battle armor and standing proud and upon first glance the painting looks fairly good there don't appear to be any major failures but as part of the examination process we look at the painting we examine it with our eyes we comb over the surface and the materials and try to learn as much as we can about the piece before we determine what needs to be done and as we can start to look at this painting we notice that while upon first glance it looked good there are some issues and these issues need to be resolved not only to make the painting look its best but to make sure that it's stable and sound for the future and as i look at this painting i'm studying the surface the varnish the paint layer the canvas the brushwork and trying to learn as much as i can about the construction of this painting i'll then begin photographing the painting both in its entirety and details of areas of concern i'll keep all of these photographs with the report for my client it's important to keep these photographs because they'll tell a history of the painting before i worked on it and after after the photography i can move over to the computer and start to do some research about the artist and one thing that i learned about thomas murray that's important is that he was a portrait painter in face only that is everything save the face was executed by his students and studio so really this is a collaborative portrait and that's important because there may be different materials or techniques that i need to be aware of when i clean the painting interestingly after prince george was killed storming the citadel he was buried in barcelona yet his heart was sent to the studkirch the major church in dahmerstadt where it remains today it is amazing what you can learn online now i don't know if prince george wanted his body and heart separated and i don't know that thomas murray wanted everybody to know he only painted the faces but i guess it's okay that these guys let other people determine their legacies no it's not okay so then what do you do about it look as an artist you don't want your legacy to be written by somebody else and have to rely upon it being published in some dusty old book like the benefit which is in french okay so how do you take control of your legacy with the website of course okay maybe you're not thinking about your legacy but what are you doing right now to leave a mark and if that seems like a hard question well the answer is really simple squarespace because they've taken all of the difficulty out of website design click a mouse you've got a site click you've chosen your template click you've added some photos want to add a store click need an email list click complex analytics click and if you do run into trouble and you can't solve it by yourself there's an online community full of people just like you to help and if that doesn't work you can reach out to a real live human for support so there really is no reason to be sitting on the sidelines anymore go to squarespace get your website start leaving a mark and start building your legacy so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com baumgartner to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain with historical information about the artist and the sitter gathered i can start focusing on the painting again and i'm going to look at the painting top to bottom and make notes for this is the most important step i can see that there is a heavy layer of discolored varnish but not much surface grime i can also see that there's at least one tear that's been mended before and upon closer examination i learned that there's not one but two linings on this painting and that's something that i'll have to explore in more depth later on the use of a loop allows me to take a closer look at the surface of the painting and understand how the impasto may or may not have been affected by the previous treatments keeping notes is incredibly important because i will take all of this information and use it to draft my proposals and my reports now there's a lot that i can learn with the naked eye and visible light but there's some stuff i just can't see and sometimes these things puzzle me because i wonder why there are incongruities and so the next step is to take the painting into my storage room into the dark and view the piece under ultraviolet light uv light will allow me to see things that i can't with the naked eye things like varnish and old retouching and that will reveal some of the old work that's happened on this painting again informing what i need to do when i start working on it ultraviolet examination is as much of a craft and art as it is a science for understanding how to read what one sees is critical to making any final determinations as i shine uv light on the painting i can see several areas of retouching or overpainting those fluoresce as dark purple or black in addition i can see a neon green haze over the entire painting and that's the old varnish now the old varnish sometimes makes it difficult to see some of the retouching but in this case it's pretty clear what i can also see are several layers of retouching some that are very old and some that are more recent and that indicates that this painting has been conserved several times though not fully or properly at each time passing over the entire painting i learned more about the work that was executed and i can see areas where tests have been made previously and covered up now whenever i see an area of retouching or over painting where there is a small damage like this tear i'm always shocked at how excessive and liberal the paint was applied i'll wear protective eyewear when doing an ultraviolet examination because prolonged exposure can be damaging to one's eyes and well i think i need my eyes and so once i've learned as much as i can about the painting through an ultraviolet examination i can take that information back and return the painting to the table where i can continue the examination i've learned a lot about the painting but there's still a little bit that i don't know and i still have some tools that will enable me to learn more it is at this point during the examination process that i can start focusing on what needs to be removed and i'll set my table up with a whole suite of solvents and solutions but before i do that before i make any actual tests on the painting i still want to get a closer look and so using a small usb microscope i can take a granular look at the surface of the painting because there were some things that i saw in the visual examination that concerned me i mentioned that the surface was very smooth and i can see here that the surface of the canvas has been compressed or flattened and that indicates that an excessive amount of pressure was used during one or both of the previous linings now unfortunately this isn't reversible but it's interesting and good to know because it will inform how i treat the painting in the future understanding some of its vulnerabilities now before testing the varnish i'm going to make some tests of the surface grime to see what if anything is on top of the varnish layer and i begin with distilled and deionized water and i move on to some enzyme cleaners to see if there in fact is anything on the surface because if i don't remove a surface grime removing the varnish can get complicated and be unsuccessful using the enzyme cleaner i can start to break down whatever is on the surface and in this case i'm finding that there really isn't any surface grime perhaps during the last conservation this painting was surface cleaned and has been well kept in the past i move on to a stronger detergent just to make sure that the enzyme didn't miss anything and here i can start to see some surface grime come off but not enough that it would cause any problem in removing the varnish so another data point has been logged and i now know more about how i'm going to proceed with the varnish removal now the prospect of removing varnish is always an exciting one but also quite perilous because if the solvents or ratios of solvents aren't correct and appropriate for the varnish that's on the painting well the painting could be damaged and so i always start with a very mild solution of solvents that i know to be safe on this painting and that knowledge comes from years and years of working on paintings it's important to start with a very mild solution to establish a baseline and as we can see this solution has almost no effect on the painting the varnish isn't softening and coming up so i can move to a stronger solution and adding a third solvent and i'm using a hypodermic needle to measure out precise amounts of solvent because this is not a case of simply adding a little bit of this adding a little bit of that and hoping that it works knowing the exact ratios will allow me to move to a more aggressive solvent with a deliberate manner and not acting willy-nilly so with that stronger solvent mixed i'll again test the painting and i can start to see some varnish coming up but not a lot so i know that this solvent isn't the right one so again i'll change the ratio or add another solvent if i feel it's necessary once i have that solvent mixed i'll return to the painting and i'll test it again and if this seems slow well it is there's no easy way to do this and no way to rush it one must take their time because there is a small window of success now i can start to see more varnish coming off and i'll make notes about what works with respect to solvents and ratios and those notes are really important because i may not be working on this painting right away it may take a while for the client to approve it or for a spot in the schedule to open up and while i like to think that my memory is that of an elephant the reality is that working on so many paintings it's possible to misremember or simply forget the correct ratio and while i could certainly execute this process over again it's not very time efficient so the notes will guide me in the future and now with a more aggressive solvent mixture i can start to see the varnish really coming up and that tells me that i am almost exactly where i want to be it might take a little bit more modification but i think i've settled on a solution that will work now once i've settled on a solution that works i always like to test an area of highlight because that's when we can see just how dramatic the change is going to be and as this yellowed varnish lifts off we can see that this armor is actually bright white and if we take a really close look using the usb microscope we can actually see the varnish layer we can see the original paint layer some residue of varnish is there but we can see what it looks like when the varnish is on the painting it's really quite thick and quite brown and so we can see just how much of an effect old varnish has on the original paint not to mention this varnish layer is quite thick and so it fills in lots of the texture texture of the canvas texture of the brush work and yes even texture of the cracks but keeping all of that texture all of that impasto is critically important because it communicates the brush work and has an effect on how ambient light hits the paint and how we see the image now of course removing the varnish is important and critical but also removing that over painting is necessary and so i'm going to take this opportunity while i'm testing the varnish to see if that solvent mixture will remove any of the overpaint and in this case it looks like we're very fortunate in that that solution does have an effect on the overpainting that was added to address the tear i also mentioned when looking at the microscope image of the surface just how thick this varnish was and if you see here in this little test the area where this varnish still remains is smooth and flat and the area where i'm removing the varnish we can start to see the texture of the canvas and that's really important because that's what we want to reveal and this provides a great opportunity to head back into the storage room under uv light to examine the work that i've just done now the uv light that i'm shining on now is going to reveal those areas of tests that i made we can see the varnish is removed that green haze is now gone the little test square that i made during the overpainting and on the armor shows just what lies beneath that varnish now with a lot of information gathered about the front of the painting i can turn my attention to the back because of course i also need to deal with the structural issues that this painting presents the stretcher support and the two linings before i can start examining these linings i have to remove some of the 10 472 staples that were used to secure this painting to the stretcher luckily these were pretty lousy staples and they come out pretty easily now why this painting had two linings is mostly a mystery but as i spend more time with it i'm starting to develop a theory and i think that this painting was previously lined to this darker brown canvas a long long time ago and at some point a hole was put into that canvas both through the original and the lining canvas and rather than removing the lining canvas and repairing it properly the next person simply realigned it a second time adding this thicker lighter colored canvas now luckily some of the glue used in that first lining is on the edge of the lining canvas and so i can scrape off a little bit of that glue and catch it with a little container and this is an important step because i need to learn what kind of adhesive was used in that first lining because i'm going to have to remove it now i can take a guess based on the age of the lining and the painting's provenance what adhesive was used and no surprise i think it was probably a rabbit skin glue adhesive but guessing and knowing are two separate things and so i'm going to test this adhesive i'm going to add a little bit of water and see if it swells and becomes activated and i can see the swabs starting to get brown which indicates that that adhesive is reacting with the water now as i continue and as i feel the adhesive it's starting to get tacky which is a second indicator that this is a waterborne adhesive now smelling it i know it seems gross confirms that it's rapid skin glue if you spend enough time smelling rabbit skin hide and fish gelatin you can start to differentiate between them now the same procedure will be carried out for the second lining canvas and right off the bat i know that this is a wax lining i can feel it i can smell it but what i'm not quite sure of yet is if any resin was used in the wax which is a common traditional technique and again that's important because it will affect how i decide to remove this lining canvas if i use heat if i use solvent if i use a combination of both and what temperature and what solvent so again gathering information will guide me as i go forward i'm going to add a little bit of solvent that has a tendency to soften up wax and i can see right off the bat that the wax starts to melt away there's a lot of canvas fibers and other detritus in there and i'm not terribly concerned about that but what i want to make sure is that that's wax without resin and that appears to be the case and i'll note this down i'll put together the proposal i'll submit it to my client and if my client proceeds i'll begin to start taking the painting apart as always thanks for watching and if you're a patreon subscriber the next episode part two where i start actually taking the painting apart will show up for you ad and sponsorship free on sunday and on youtube on monday for everyone else

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 816,007

Keywords: Baumgartner, Julian, restoration, ASMR, paintings, cleaning, scraping, repair, Art, fine art, conservation, painting restoration, old art, painting, painting conservation, oil painting, new again, restore, classical

Id: Mb8ZVUzSQeM

Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020