The Wedding Party by Jan Steen: A Conservation Story

My name's Alice Tate-Hart, I'm a painting conservator. This painting is called The Wedding Party by Jan Steen. As a painting conservator, I care for the collection of paintings. The conservation aspects of my job is kind of twofold. I'm partly doing a bit of preventive conservation, so that's looking at how to protect the paintings from various risks like too much light, too high or low humidity and pests. There's all sorts of different risks that I'm thinking about all the time. I also get to do the interventive side of conservation, so that just means the kind of hands-on work of actually handling paintings and the craft side of working on them and going through this conservation process. Jan Steen was famous for painting genre scenes, which are essentially paintings of daily life really. So these sort of merry scenes were quite typical of 17th century Dutch painting. It's kind of looking at peasant life and that sort of revelry. The scene depicts a couple getting married. This is the bride and groom here. They're sort of pushed into the background really by all these other merry figures in the wedding party. This is possibly a self-portrait of Jan Steen. That was something he used to do quite often, pop himself into the painting. We also have this lovely figure of the spaniel in the foreground and still life, which Jan Steen often liked to paint. They're really beautifully painted. When a painting's come into the studio for conservation, it's a really good opportunity to do some technical analysis and look at how the painting was made and what materials it was made with. It was really interesting to look at the painting in infrared light. We found that there's a figure of a dog, which is in a different position down here and there's lots of changes going on throughout the painting. There's a sort of area of red where the blouse was originally painted. So he's making changes as he goes. Some artists would plan things quite carefully and stick to that plan, but Jan Steen's happy to develop his painting directly on the canvas. So I've set up these UV lights here. The UV light is making the varnish fluoresce. The previous conservator in the 1950s has retouched areas of damage, so along the edges here, and you can see that along where the canvas join is. There's that loss around the signature down there and also in the stomach of this figure here. So there are areas of abrasion or lost paint that have been retouched and that lets me understand the extent of the damage on the painting. After the examination, I was able to surface clean the painting. I use little swab sticks, so it's just little pieces of cotton rolled over a satay stick and I can dampen that in different solutions. But in this instance, I just use saliva because spit is a really good cleaning agent and it just takes off surface dirt really nicely. There's special enzymes in spit, which means it dissolves dirt really well. This painting hangs at Apsley House, which is just on Hyde Park corner roundabout, so there's a lot of particulate dirt that comes from the emissions of the vehicle. Then the next step is to take the varnish off, so the varnish has gone quite yellow. Gently rolling over the surface, I could clean the painting with solvents. One that solubilises the varnish but doesn't solubilise or do anything bad to the paint. Once that yellow varnish has been removed, you're getting back to all the original colours of the paint underneath. So with that yellow veil removed, you can really see the artist's original intention. Moving on to the restoration stage, the painting would have been painted in oil paint, but the problem with that is that it yellows over time. So we use resins, a bit like the varnish that was put on, and we can select the same pigments. We have a rough idea of what pigments the artist used and we can make up a palette with those and just mix our colours and retouch and you just build up the layers up to the glaze layer as well. Every painting that comes into the studio is a different challenge. You learn something new from each one, either about the artist or the way it's made, or just that conservation process, you know, you need to think creatively. And you're constantly learning all the time because the science behind conservation is always developing new techniques, not just in technical art history and looking at paintings, but in the sorts of chemicals we use and what things are available to us. So it's sort of intellectual as well and definitely a really engaging job.