Lost at Sea...again? Is this the painting I've been looking for?

In my last search for a Carmichael I found myself shipwrecked. But this time something feels different and this painting has led me back to sea. I don't know where it has been painted, I don't know where it is off, but I aim to find out. Join me on this journey as I try and find attribution for this painting or will I be again lost at sea. As soon as I saw this painting at auction there was something familiar about it that just spoke to me. Yes it's in bad condition, yes it's seen better days, but there's something about those fishermen and that boat on the right hand side that just called to me. I felt like I'd seen this work before and I felt a real familiarity with this painting. Now the problem is there are no clues on this painting whatsoever. We have the There's nothing on the stretcher, there's no signature that I can find and there are certainly areas of damage that need to be addressed. Now I bought this painting blind, it just spoke to me and I feel like there are similarities here with Carmichael. The figures at the front, the way the boat's being painted, but somebody's tackled this before. There are elements that have been cleaned, the UV light shows retouching and overpaint, it shows areas that have been over cleaned in the past. There are large sections of craquelure where the paint has dried too quickly and this has been filled in with fresh paint and this bottom left corner is just horrific. There's so much overpaint on there, it's absolutely thick. Now I'm going to clean this painting and restore it and I'm going to try and give it a proper attribution, but the first thing I need to do is test that it will clean and see what varnish is on there that I can remove. Now the paint surface is pretty clean, I can see that it's been cleaned in the past, you can see that partial varnish removal from the centre section. So I'm going to go straight in on the edge with a solvent that should remove that varnish. So using this mixture now I'm just going to go into the and straight away you can see that the solvents are dissolving that varnish and revealing that bright blue underneath. Now what's unusual is that someone's cleaned this and not cleaned the edge of that painting, so whether they cleaned it whilst it was in situ or maybe there was multiple varnish layers. Now my second solution is designed to remove any surface dirt or accumulations and it's coming back blank, so this painting has had a general clean all over it. If there was any dirt on here or any nicotine that solution would remove and again testing on the painting where the varnish has previously been removed shows up blank. So this painting's had a little bit of a history, it has been cleaned fairly recently but then it was abandoned, so maybe the person who was cleaning it decided that it wasn't worth it or they had other projects on. Now again this is the solution to remove any nicotine or dirt, sometimes it can remove historic overpaint but it's not really taking anything off there, so again telling me that this has been cleaned or at least surface cleaned in the past. Now my solvent solution, let's see what it brings up there, now straight away that's a lot darker than the varnish in the sky area, so this is telling me straight away that this area is thick with overpaint and not surprising you can see that apparent already, so where that extensive crackler is it's been filled in and overpainted, so my solution first tackles the varnish layer and then it will start biting into that overpaint and you can see the swab coming off and much darker as it takes off that historical retouching. A lot of Carmichael's work is signed on the bottom left corner and then on arrival any hope of finding a signature was soon dashed, there's so much retouching on here and overpaint that any signature that was here on this side is long gone. Even though the paint surface is rough and damaged it is very secure so I'm not looking to reline this painting or stripline it, I'm going to do a thread repair and bridging method on the back of the canvas but before I can do that the back of the canvas is going to need cleaning. So the back has got hundreds of years of dust and dirt that's accumulated and this little attachment is great just for a standard vacuum cleaner, you can set the suction variable and it comes with a underneath those stretcher bars so all those deposits, pine needles, insects, you name it, that's all collected underneath there and this tool is really good at just getting underneath there gently and removing all that debris and dirt. To repair the rips and tears on this canvas I'm going to do it locally so I'm not relining the whole picture, I'm just applying some blotting paper that's had a little bit of moisture applied to it and then I'm going to press this down so the moisture will just allow that canvas to kind of relax and flatten out and then it'll make it a lot easier for when I come to do the thread repair and bridging technique. So this will be covered with Melonex, I'll apply some weight, just a gentle weight to it and I'll probably leave it for say 20 minutes, 25 minutes and I'll just check during that process just to make sure that nothing untoward is happening, the moisture level is correct and while that's doing what it needs to do I can prepare some small little bits of linen. Now I separate this off into small sections about a centimetre long and then these will be used to strengthen the repair of the canvas from the back so when I remove the Melonex you can see the blotting paper has kind of drawn out some of the dirt and impurities from the back of the canvas but it's also allowed that to relax. Now you could take the whole painting off the stretcher, put it on the heated vacuum table and do it that way but for just small repairs like this where they're only a few centimetres long this technique works perfectly well and you can see there how the tears have flattened out nicely and there's just a few of those threads that need to be aligned now so also from the front you can see that it's flattened out nicely from the front and it's a little bit up to tension. So the next stage will be me organising those loose fibres, applying my glue mixture which is a mixture of wheat starch paste, fish glue and rabbit skin glue and I apply the bonding threads across so it's almost like you're putting stitches in. The thread repair glue will keep the rip together and then these just offer a little bit more stability to the back of the canvas and it's a little bit less invasive than putting a patch on there which sometimes can weigh through to the front and emboss and when it's only a small repair it's perfectly fine to use this method. Okay guys the repairs are dry now, I've left those overnight and I'm really pleased with how they've turned out. It's just going to strengthen those areas, there's a little bit of thread repair on there as well so I'm happy with that and now I get to clean this painting. I can't tell you how excited I am to actually start revealing the actual colours of this painting and hopefully find some clues. I am so optimistic that something's just going to pop out, I can't tell you but yeah I think this now will be such a treat and the colours that we reveal will be fantastic so let's hope it's not a nightmare. I am aware there's certain parts of this painting that are going to be horrific, that bottom left-hand corner is going to be horrific, there's no other way to describe what that's going to look like after I've cleaned it but that's a small percentage that's, I don't know, like three percent or five percent of the whole painting. the varnish is still fluorescing green so that's where varnish hasn't removed and then the black areas are the overpaint in those deep crackler fissures. So what I'm going to do with these sections is, because it's so hard to know what's overpaint, what's original, I'm going to clean whilst using the UV light or having the UV light on so you'll be able to see what I'm removing as I'm removing it. So I've been using this method a little bit more recently, it just gives you that little bit more confidence so as I'm cleaning the UV light is on and then you can see that luminous green removing so that's the varnish coming off and you can see there that the painting is still intact I'm not removing anything that I shouldn't be and then again back under UV you can see that from his jacket now the majority of that varnish has gone and then you can carry on working that across the painting as well so in this section here you've got lots of varnish here that green but you can also see the overpaint underneath that's black as well so that's on top of the varnish layer so it's been varnished and then the overpaint has gone on top of that so you can see there under UV how that varnish removes it just gives you a little bit more confidence that what when to carry on and when to stop and look at that painting now it's just so pleased with it it's so good I love love probably mentioned these little guys on this boat here are fantastic and the way they correspond to the tones of these fishermen it's just just brilliant there are large areas of damage that we know about here and up here and then this very thick crackler is all the way through the painting now some of it's cleaned off quite easily and I'm down to the bare canvas underneath some of it is quite stubborn and is not moving so rather than try and remove that for very little gain I think the best thing to do is just leave those in place I'm going to be filling over a large amount of these bigger areas anyway and retouching so to remove some of the smaller or darker areas for no gain there's no point being overly aggressive and possibly removing some of the actual original paint as well so I'm gonna leave that clean there for now I think it looks balanced I know what's happening with the painting there's a certain element of a few bits near the harbour that I'm not entirely sure and I think that must be another sail or something similar coming into the harbour so the next thing to do I've just wiped over with a neutralising spirit to stop any advancements of any of the cleaning solutions and then that will dry and then we will be looking at putting a barrier varnish on there but I'm really pleased with how it looks it looks so good so yeah barrier varnish next but first let me take you on a little trip if you remember a few months ago on the opie painting I came to Manchester library and I found a little book on John Wilson Carmichael so I've come back today I'm going to have a read through this see if I can find out any little bits or nuggets of information that's going to help me with the attribution there are some fabulous paintings in this book there are some that speak to me directly now if you look at the highlight on the back of that boat that's one of Carmichael's signature painting techniques he'll always put a really strong highlight on a boat bow or stern and the other thing I'm trying to do is locate where this painting might be and this book has got some great clues this is Sunderland harbour if you look there's two piers there's a red flag on one of the piers as well this is by Carmichael he obviously visited the area so this is kind of seeping into my mind now as well as where this painting could be now even though Carmichael was successful in his lifetime he did have to rely on small paintings and pot boilers to pay his bills one eyewitness said one morning I went into his studio and found eight or ten small pictures fixed up before the fire to facilitate faster drying our painting is showing all the signs of being speeded up in its drying time which has allowed that shrinkage to happen another little clue is how he would work on his compositions here he says that he suggests bringing attention to objects such as rock seaweed or rusty eyeing or pieces of wreckage in the front of a painting using old buoys and posts much like the paraphernalia in the front of our picture this was interesting as well so the human elements are invariably turned away or they are looking down wearing wide brimmed hats or his characteristic red woolen caps other times he loses the face in an indistinct mist now our figures have the red woolen caps on shore and in the boat and his face is a little bit indistinct he was he comforted himself though because even his idle turner sometimes fudged up the faces so he wasn't too bothered about that now carmichael did go to london and he was fairly successful it just wasn't the level of success he wanted he retired to scarborough moving to mulgrave terrace where he stayed the rest of his life until he passed away one funny anecdote i found though was for his time in london so he always preserved his northern habit of speech so he must have been a full-on geordie and had so much difficulty in making himself understood in london society that on one occasion a lady asked him how long he had lived in england and wondered that he had not made more progress with the language but um i think carmichael had a good sense of humor and things like that didn't bother him too much i saw a couple of entries where he did have paintings exhibited in the royal academy good paintings but they were sky they were hung so high that nobody could see them so where does this leave us with our painting for me the big clues from for us are the highlights on the bow of the boat the fact that this painting is probably a pot boiler it was sold to somebody local to pay the bills it was of an area of the northeast there's the hats that the fishermen are wearing but there's also that shrinkage that ridiculous amount of crackler and i can just imagine this painting being sat outside carmichael's fire and drying rapidly to make a sale so on the way back to the studio i've got all this going around in my mind but i also need to pinpoint the location of this painting now before i went away i put a call out to you guys to try and find out from a few very cryptic clues where this might be where do you think this could be in the country and these are some of the answers that you gave back quite a number of people were taken by the white cliffs and admiral bay in dover came up whitby came up a number of times the harbour there is a little bit different though staves came up for the cliffs very very similar north shields also came up for a similar kind of harbour setting but what i did do was i looked at all the suggestions that people came with and i went for a bit of a google around as i like to do and i traveled all the way up the east coast and i zoomed in on these places that were suggested and i looked for any similarities geographical kind of landmarks the harbours and to try and find if i could pinpoint where this might be now from the book that harbour of sunderland looked pretty good and then when i zoomed in on sunderland harbour i saw the opening on the north and the south pier now for me when i look at our painting you can see there's a definite two harbour walls coming out so on these other paintings of sunderland pier by carmichael and also by stewart henry bell you can see the flag you can see the old lighthouse and on this image here where x marks the spot you can see that on the right hand side you've got the north and the south pier now if carmichael was stood on the x you would be able to see the north and the south pier on his right hand side and again looking at this etching from back in the day you can see that this harbour arrangement speaks quite strongly from our composition so is it sunderland harbour is it whitby it's still a little bit up in the air but before i can fully decide where i'm going to attribute this painting to we need to crack on i need to apply the barrier varnish i need to fill the painting and i need to start the retouching before i can do any of that retouching though i need to fill all the areas of damage some of these larger areas of crackler as well need filling as well so i'm using my conservation grade filler i'm going to overfill the areas and then once the area has been filled and i'm happy with the surface i will clean off the residue and tidy it up ready for retouching now there is quite a lot of surface crackler on here it is quite uneven but that's just the painting showing its age and as mentioned earlier if this painting was completed in a hurry and if carmichael was drying it over a fire it could have made those under layers contract very quickly so i'm not going to fill everything and some of those areas that you can see here i'm just going to retouch those in and push those back otherwise the painting would just be full of white crazy paving filler which is unnecessary i'm just going to retouch in the worst of these areas okay guys i've just finished first pass retouching there and he is looking pretty good um i'm going to see how it dries though there's some elements in the sky around oh that was quite good here and uh let's try to do this opposite i'm going to cheat around here there's another little bit here that might dry a little bit funny might need a little bit more retouching but um yeah he's looking really good i enjoy putting the shore work back in here to try and get that to look a little bit more like a beach with that pebbles and stuff happening there and also touching in the boat i still love these little guys in the boat um just fantastic the way the light's hitting this guy here hoisting the sail fabulous um so i'm going to leave that overnight i'm going to come back in tomorrow and then we're getting really close then it's getting so close to being finished um i'm really excited and um yeah so let's come back tomorrow and see how this painting is looking so next day i'm back in the studio the majority of the retouching looks pretty good there's going to be some minor adjustments so i'm going to put on the first coat or top coat of varnish this is a hydrocarbon varnish it's going to form a really good seal across the whole of this painting but it's also going to show me if my retouching is good sometimes the varnish goes on and your retouching is a little bit out so if you look at the top right of the ship you can see the red flag and on the right hand side my retouching is a little bit pale there so that's going to need a little bit of adjustment and likewise above this mast here you can see this little dark cloud area now that's not been addressed so that'll have to be pushed back and toned down a little bit as well so when the varnish layer goes on invariably you get it right but sometimes there is going to have to be a second pass so i'm going to let that dry reassess when it comes out the next day and see if there's any final little bits that need looking at and for some reason putting the picture in the frame makes these little not errors but adjustments all too apparent so sometimes i like to fit the painting up thinking it's finished and then you view it and you realize what you need to do so with the frame and painting fitted back up together i know you're all dying to find out what my attribution is so without further ado i've gone with fishing boats off now you may be wondering how i got to this there was lots of evidence pointing towards sunderland as opposed to whitby which was the other choice of people now the thing with whitby is the harbors are different especially at this time so this is 1778 and you can see the west pier extends out and the east pier is somewhat behind it and again on this image from 1868 i think it is or 1828 the west pier extends forward and the other pier is hidden behind whereas on sunderland you can see here that we've got the um i think it was the north pier and the south pier now if this is where he was stood that north pier with the same kind of construction as on our painting the south pier would appear from around the back of it if you like so that's why i've gone with sunderland harbour this is just my best guesstimate if you like there's probably lots of other factors involved in where this may be it could be just a made-up um scene you never know he could have took artistic license with this painting and just decided to put some things together because the cliffs do look very much like the cliffs at whitbear but then that harbour does suggest sunderland to me but i am thinking northeast england those cliffs people suggested flamborough head with the chalkiness but they kind of got a bit more of a tone to it but the thing for me with this painting is that highlight and those figures on that boat that suggests carmichael to me that's how he painted that's how he painted his images that's what he pulled together to to get his look and if this was a pot boiler if this was something to pay the bills he may well have just kind of put a composite together of different areas but there is something in that harbour there with a flag that does suggest to me sunderland but i stand to be corrected anyway so the painting looks fabulous i'm so pleased with how it's turned out we've got the reflection of these fishermen in the water at the bottom they're pulling the nets in there's some lovely colours and there's some lovely little details in here as well so i'm really pleased with how it's turned out so here's the before you can see damaged the crackler the overpaint the discoloured varnish the part clean it really was in a sorry state and then as we've cleaned the varnish off we've repaired those damages sympathetically and we've restored the canvas where necessary this painting now retouched just looks fabulous and those colours are really shining through i just love that sea and that boat the way it's positioned on there is just fabulous and then fit it up into its frame so this is a bespoke reproduction frame that i commissioned for the painting we've got the nameplate on there now and this just really sets it off i just feel like this painting deserves this right guys i hope you enjoyed that episode uh thanks for all those that uh put answers in for the competition as well so what i've done is i've put all your comments into a spreadsheet and i've generated a random number now nobody actually guessed Sunderland quite a lot of you guessed Whitbear but i'm i've give it my best attribution i could be wrong who knows but that's as close as i think i can get it so everybody who put a comment in so whether you guessed Gibraltar Dover Whitbear you've all been entered into the competition i've generated a random number from a spreadsheet and i'm pleased to say that the winner is quid 2005 so if you want to get in touch with me send me a dm or an email i'll put my email address in the description and contact me and i will send out your limited edition signed prints so but thanks everyone who had a guess it made it really good fun and you gave me some real good ideas to search as well so that's all we have time for on this episode i've got some more paintings coming for you soon thanks as ever to all my patrons for supporting the channel it means so much to know you there and you're supporting everything that i do and in the meantime i've done a weather report for a while now we're in September Manchester is a bit coldish overcasty but not raining and overcasty is a word right guys i will see you all on the next one take care thank you hi guys i forgot to mention that if this painting captured your attention and you really like it and would like to own it it is now for sale on my website i will put a link in the description and this is the address here but yeah if you want to purchase this fabulous picture and hang it on your wall head over to the website and you can have a look at it as well i will include free international shipping so it doesn't matter where you are in the world that will be covered right i am going now okay take care guys bye