A Conservation Project: Prince Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School by the Studio of Velázquez

We're very excited to embark on a major project around one of our best-loved pictures here at the Wallace Collection, Prince Balthasar Carlos in the Riding School. This is a picture that hangs here in our great gallery and is incredibly popular with visitors. Today is a really exciting moment for the Wallace Collection because we're about to send out this fantastic painting to be conserved. It's a picture that is incredibly popular with the public, particularly children, as you can imagine, and also with Spanish experts. We still really want to know much more about this picture. This painting represents Prince Balthasar Carlos, the beloved son of King Philip IV of Spain and Queen Isabella of Bourbon. He was born in 1629 and he was heir to the throne. He's here shown at about age seven, riding a pony in what is thought to have been a riding school. The portrait is incredibly innovative because it takes us into areas of the court that had not yet been seen before in painting. So rather than representing Balthasar Carlos on a horse, as would have been more common in equestrian portraits, in a nondescript setting, what Velázquez does is he creates an entire narrative around the prince on his horse so that we can better understand what is happening around him. So this painting is actually a major departure from what we are used to in equestrian portraits of this period. What's astounding is that we haven't properly cleaned and restored this picture since the 19th century. So what we're doing now is we're sending it off to be cleaned, restored, and we're going to have the latest technical examination undertaken around this picture to better understand its structure, how it was produced. At the moment it sits somewhere within the Velázquez studio. It was a painting that was originally attributed to Velázquez and we'd like to better understand its relationship to the master. The existence of another version of this painting in a private collection has raised questions about the authorship of our picture. And what we hope to do through this extensive research project is to better understand who is responsible for this wonderful painting. We're thrilled to be collaborating with a very experienced conservator, Nicole Ryder, who has restored a number of Spanish pictures. So the painting will be going off to her studio where she will remove this old varnish and old retouchings and restoring the picture to its original glory. My name's Nicole Ryder and I'm a freelance paintings conservator working for the Wallace Collection. I have started cleaning Balsar Carlos in the Riding School and I'm about halfway through the process. When the painting entered the studio, it's clear that the condition is quite stable in terms of the attachment of the paint to the canvas. It's not flaking. The varnish, which was applied in the 1930s, is actually quite discoloured. Spanish paintings of the 17th century often have quite a cool palette and tonality so they are particularly affected by discoloured varnishes. But it's not just the dirtiness of the varnish which affects the appearance, it's also the tone of the painting, so the lightness and the darkness will be affected and that restricts three-dimensional space and interest and detail in the painting. Since I've removed half the varnish, I'm beginning to see some of the old damages that are appearing. For example, in the roof here we have one of the old retouched damages. We've got small damages appearing around the edges. The colour is different, the sky is bluer, the sketchy brush strokes are more obvious. In the sky over here on the left, you can see these grey areas are actually puffs of smoke, which makes sense of the little figure clambering over the wall. The figures on the balcony probably represent two women and a child. Before this cleaning, we weren't absolutely sure whether we had a male figure here or not, but it's beginning to become more legible. Once I've removed the varnish, I will consider the next layer of cleaning and that involves removing old discoloured restoration. The painting will then go out to the studio for technical analysis and that will help us understand the painting better, how it was made and who it might be by. It's been several months since I started the conservation process. The discoloured varnish and old restoration has been removed, the painting's been lined, the loss is filled, there's new varnish on the painting and I'm presently in the process of retouching those losses. As well as the conservation work on the painting, we've also carried out a range of technical analysis, including x-ray, which was useful for determining the condition. So the painting has not changed substantially in size. It's lost a little bit at the top edge, perhaps a couple of centimetres, but otherwise the size is pretty much as we see it today. We can see that there are losses around the edges, but not too many within the picture. The ground application is very characteristic and we can see large curved white marks on the x-ray image which relate to the type of ground and the way it was applied with a large curved spatula. Now that we can see the painting more clearly, we can see that it has a slightly unfinished appearance and maybe this is because it was left at an intermediary stage and that there was an intention to develop it further, but for some reason this never happened. We've been wondering whether this painting is a parallel commission or variation of a painting of the same subject by Velázquez in a private collection, but it was quite common practice for Velázquez Studio to create other versions of paintings and some of the materials and techniques used in the Wallace painting are very similar to those of the privately owned painting. I'm at the final stages in the treatment, the retouching and the re-varnishing, and once that's completed, the painting will return to the Wallace Collection. It's an exciting moment. There's always a little bit of jeopardy involved because you don't know whether the fit in the frame is going to be correct, whether your retouchings are going to show up. I'm pretty happy with how it looks and looking forward to seeing it back on the wall. It is extremely exciting to see the painting back after a whole year. It is much brighter. The colours are saturated. It has regained depth and detail. This painting is a piece shrouded in mystery. We haven't been able to date the painting to a firm date. We have, however, been able to place the painting closer within Velázquez Studio and his close entourage. And the other really important thing of it hanging here at the Wallace Collection is that it hangs besides another portrait of Baltasar Carlos when the prince was younger and next to a portrait of his half-sister, the Infanta Margarita. So this can tell a lot about the Spanish royal court and that combined with the scenes of everyday life at the court in the background can tell the audience about how a prince was brought up and educated. With the painting back hanging in the Great Gallery, we will have a great opportunity to further help research our own paintings but also other paintings by the artists in other museums and collections.