This Painting was on the Brink of Total Collapse

When this painting first arrived in the studio it was already beginning to fall apart. The tacking edges had completely deteriorated and it was beginning to belly and crumble. There was so much damage along the edges that I wasn't sure how it was staying on this stretcher at all. The customer had brought the painting in for a clean but before I could get to that it would need to be fully stabilised and then there was the issue of who this guy was. He seemed to have horns protruding from his head. I wasn't quite sure what the tablet said on his right hand side or what the history of this painting was at all but there was a certain mystery and a certain charm to it that really intrigued me. The first thing that I needed to do was check under UV for any damage and here you can see on his cheek there's damage and under his eye there as well there's some damage as well. It looks like this painting's been cleaned in the past. There's areas of paint that is showing canvas coming through. There's an extremely thick varnish on there which is fluorescing green so no doubt this painting has been passed down through the ages. It's got so much, I don't know, authentic charm shall we say. It's on a strainer rather than a stretcher so there's no keys in there that can keep it under tension and you can just see that craquelure pattern on the back there. As it's fluctuated in temperature from hot and cold and damp and dry the canvas has expanded and contracted and that's what's caused that pattern. There's centuries of accumulated dirt and grime and dust on that bottom edge but the main issue with this painting for the immediate is how badly deteriorated those tacking edges are. Now you can see that someone's tried to secure a canvas strip along the side at some point but that has also failed. So what I need to do is remove the canvas from the stretcher without causing too much undue stress. Now when I was first shown this technique I was terrified and I was like you want me to slice the painting off the stretcher but with plenty of practice it is a really efficient way of removing the painting from the stretcher with minimal impact. Imagine how much stress and strain this picture would be under if I was trying to get each one of those individual tacks out. The canvas would be flapping back and forth but by using that razor blade I can just slice along the tacking edge, keep nice and straight and just remove the painting from the strainer. And with that said it's nice to remove that off and then just see what I'm dealing with in terms of the canvas. And you can just see the dirt and dust at that bottom edge that's collected. It looks like it's been there for, I don't know, easily a hundred years or more. It's impacted, it's almost matted. So I imagine there is elements of damp in this painting as well at some point but we've got the obligatory Christmas tree needles in there, all sorts of detrius, bits of barley maybe there as well that seems to appear quite a lot. Maybe it has been stored in a barn like some of those other paintings but it's quite thick. You can see how thick those deposits are. So I'm just going to remove the larger sections with my spatula and once the thickest parts of that are off I'll just gently brush the canvas, remove some of those lighter areas and then we'll give the back of the painting a thorough cleaning and a vacuum. So in terms of age of this canvas I do think we're probably looking at late maybe 18th century, early 19th century. From the first glance it looks like a devotional piece, probably in a church somewhere. I'm not exactly sure how it's ended up with my client but these things do get disseminated over time. Now what I'm going to do because there is that craquelure, because it is quite widespread through the painting, I'm going to reline this canvas. I'm going to put it on the heated table as well so the hot table will help flatten out all those undulations and we'll be able to get a really nice flat surface on the painting. So I'm using some of my high quality Belgian linen to do this. This will provide a really strong support for that painting and it's of a similar weight original canvas so it's not going to pull it too much, it's not going to put it under too much pressure. And I've also ordered a new stretcher for the painting. So this is an exhibition standard stretcher that I've got. It's a custom size and this will provide proper ongoing support for the painting. The strainer doesn't have those keys to put it under tension whereas this does. And again, this stretcher will be good for another 100 years or so and it'll just support that painting going forward rather than putting it back on that old strainer which has served its purpose. Yes it's got a little bit of historical merit to it but I've got to do what's best for the painting at this point and a new stretcher is going to support that painting going forward. So with my linen cut to size I'm just going to transfer the painting over and use it as a template so I can mark out exactly where my adhesive needs to go. So at this stage the painting is still very fragile. It's probably at its most vulnerable now. It's off the stretcher, it's got no support. So I'm always very careful how I move the painting around the studio. If you picked this up by its edges currently you could damage it. The canvas is brittle. So once I've marked out my template I'm applying a heat reactive adhesive to the backing linen and to the painting and then this will go on the heated table and once it goes on the table it's a vacuum process as well. So it goes on non-stick melonex sheet. There's another melonex layer that goes over the top and then over the top of this goes a latex blanket which will form the vacuum and this blanket has been provided by a very good friend of mine and those of you who've been watching the channel for a while will see that this is a massive upgrade from what was here before. It looks fantastic. So as the table heats the adhesive warms the vacuum flattens everything down together and you can see there that the adhesive now has warmed up and then the vacuum has flattened the whole painting and attached it to that new strip of linen and at this stage now you can move it around. It is supported, it is strong and the difference is just quite telling. You can see how flat it is. It's fully secured onto that piece of canvas and that's the beauty of the heated table. It does do a really good job of flattening out a painting like this. Now if the painting had impasto or thicker paint, brush strokes, I would probably use a different method but for a painting like this which is very thin and very flatly applied paint surface it's ideal. The painting's going to be secured onto the stretcher and I'm going to be using tacks to do this. So the first thing I do is make sure that the painting is all square on the and then just methodically go around the whole painting applying the tacks. So I'll go from once it's square I'll go from opposite side to opposite side and then rotate the whole canvas around and applying pressure as well. So because this painting is quite flat now and it's secure on there I don't need to put too much tension so at the moment I can just use my hands. If it did require a little bit more I could get the canvas pliers out and put it under a little bit more pressure but at this stage it's absolutely fine. It's quite nice to see him it's almost checking me out seeing what I'm doing but at this point once it's going back on the stretcher you're a little bit more confident in the handling of the painting and what I need to do now is just tidy up those edges. So there's loads of different methods you can use to tidy the edges up on the back but I quite like using a traditional method where we glue those tacking edges down. It provides a little bit more support so if those pins or tacks fail over time this glue, and it's a hide glue, provides really good support to that tacking edge as well so it's just going to make it a lot more stable and it tidies things up nicely. Now if you guys had smell-o-vision you'd be holding your nose because this animal glue oh it smells so bad. It makes me imagine what it must have been like to be near a tannery or something back in the day but it is a really strong smell and it does get up your nostrils and it stays with you for a day or two. The nice thing about this kind of glue it is reversible so all animal glues are reversible with water so for that it's a really good conservation grade glue to use. So I'm just going to liberally apply this on the stretcher using the cut mark as my template and then you've got a little bit of dwell time and then you can press it down but literally I don't know 20-30 seconds and this will hold down and hold in place as well which is just brilliant. I quite like this stage of the process as well because this is going to be one of the final bits of the puzzle in terms of putting it all back together and then once that's all secured we can start to concentrate on the rest of the restoration. Now you'll see that I've not put these stretcher keys in yet, I'll do that later on in the process but this is how he looks after the full structural work. So you can see it's much flatter, all that cockling, all those ripples on the edges and those creases have all gone and you can view the painting as it is now without being distracted by all that damage. Right guys, he's fully stabilised now, relined, he's been on the heat table, he looks beautifully flat, he looks really good and I know that he's secure now, he's good for a good, I don't know, 100-150 years, maybe longer. But this episode was all about cleaning this guy and I've already done some tests which you might have seen. These were for my client to, well, so that we would know that he would clean but I think the colours are just going to pop on this guy so let's get him on the bench and let's start cleaning him. So when a painting like this comes into the studio and is so yellowed you're thinking one of two things, it's either tobacco tar staining from smoking or smoke damage or you're thinking a very discoloured varnish. So the first thing that I always test for is the tar staining, so for that I use an aqueous solution and this will just kind of give me an idea of how much surface dirt there is on the picture and then if there is surface dirt on there then great, sometimes that's all you need to do but from the UV assessment we also do know that there is quite a lot of varnish on here as well. So this is the first solution, this would tell me if it is kind of tar staining and there's very little coming off. This is the solvent solution, this is what is going to remove that discoloured varnish, it's very yellowed, it's probably a dammar varnish, it's very thick, there is so much varnish on this painting and you'll be able to see the difference here as well. So different pigments have different strengths, your white pigments are always stronger, your brown pigments and earth tones are always weaker, so by testing your swab in different areas and your solution you get a real good idea of whether your mixture is too strong or too weak and you can tweak it a little bit. So once you're happy with your solution you can begin the cleaning process and I tend to start on an area where I know the tones and the pigments are going to be the strongest. So on his hand here we can already see the flesh tones coming through, we know what kind of colour we're expecting when that varnish removes so we can be quite confident. If you look on the left hand side where his gown is and those brown tones I wouldn't start there because I just don't know exactly what's going on there, it looks quite weak the paint and it looks like it's been cleaned in the past. So I always tend to start in those areas where I'm most confident, if it was a landscape it'd be in the sky where the white pigments are the strongest in the clouds but on a portrait it's usually on the flesh tones and already you can see such a difference, that hand is painted so strongly you can see those veins going through and it's really starting to jump now and it's so nice to see those original tones coming through. His gown is changing from yellow to a kind of shimmery pale blue and there are elements of richness in there as well but what's coming through you can see the underpaint. Now I think this may well have been over cleaned in the past, maybe some glazes have been removed but where the beard is tackled as well it's also got that underpaint coming through. Now this could have been as it's intended, the artist could have been quite loose and experimenting with different layers of paint so I'm just trying to be very careful. This element on his shoulder was already highlighted as being over cleaned, you can see some of the ground coming through there so again always treading carefully around there and then we will start on his face. Now the varnish is so thick and I'm expecting real gains here so when that varnish starts to dissolve and absorb into the swab we should see some real nice contrast between the flesh tones and the discoloured varnish and straight away there you can see his hair is coming through as white rather than yellowed. We're going to see that highlight from his eye pop and more flesh tones come through and then this is the exciting bit you're actually seeing the painting how it's not been seen for hundreds of years you know this is how the artist intended it and then over time it's aged and faded and gets pushed further back into the canvas but by removing that varnish you're allowing those original colours to come through and then you can see the difference straight away. There is a little bit of a repair underneath his eye that you can see a little bit of filler but again that showed up with the uv assessment but what you can't see here is how thick that varnish is it's it's almost claggy it takes so long for it to actually dissolve and then it grabs and it drags on your cotton swab as well so once it's fully loaded it's time to get a fresh one start moving in a different location now this is quite a long process and then this section here is where that damage was so on his cheek you'll see the historical overpaint start removing with the solution and revealing the filled area underneath so we knew this was going to happen there so i'm not concerned about that but what i will do is try and remove as much of that as possible for when we come to retouching later on but the the brush strokes in his beard there's almost like a playful application there you can tell the artist enjoyed layering up those tones and giving that curl and that depth to the beard and there's the swab pile they're so thick with varnish but if you do look the colour's consistent so i'm confident that what's removing is just a varnish there's not too much historical overpaint coming off only those small sections we've found so far so with the majority of the flesh tones cleaned and the varnish removed and his gown i'll now move on to some of the more difficult sections now removing varnish that's discoloured off background areas dark tones is not fun it's not even very visually stimulating to watch it's just a slog it's just a long process making sure all that varnish is removed and to clean the whole rest of this painting took hours and hours and hours and it's just part of the process you just have to go through it remove that varnish knowing that you're taking it straight back down to paint surface so after quite a large amount of time removing that varnish from the painting and a very sore shoulder from that repetitive motion over and over again i've got the painting to a point that i'm happy with now i've got the paint layer exposed the majority of that varnish is removed now i say majority because in some parts of that tablet there was over paint that was fused with the varnish layer and i didn't want to remove all that lettering um i'd have to put it all back in so i've been not selective but tentative on that tablet side of the painting but the rest of the painting responded beautifully now i'm applying a varnish layer now this is going to act as a barrier for those small areas of retouching that i need to do i've added a little bit of gloss to this as well because it may form part of the final varnish layer as well but you can see those colours really start to shine through now and it's just fabulous to see the depth of that painting coming back to life um it's just it is one of my favourite parts of the process and he looks so good the way he's been painted he has that kind of almost rubens quality to him now i know it's probably a provincial painter that's done this and i know it's not a grand masterpiece but there are elements that really work so the artist really understood what he was doing he knew how to paint and i think he was economical in the way he applied it he was quite liberal in areas and quite loose in others but there's something about the character of this gentleman that is captured um and yeah just seeing this varnish layer now just starts to give more depth and more atmosphere to this picture so i'm really excited for the next stage and while this varnish is drying let's have a look at this painting and see if we can find a little bit more about it now i'm pretty sure that some of you as soon as you saw the painting will have recognized who this is for me as the cleaning progressed the inscription on the tablet slowly began to emerge and the text appears to reference the book of exodus strongly suggesting that this figure shown here is moses the unusual rays projecting from his head have a long and fascinating history in western art due to an early translation of the bible moses was sometimes depicted with horns or beams of divine light and this was a tradition that appeared in religious paintings for centuries and sculptures and if you look into it there's so much on this it's quite incredible so what we've got here is a painting of moses the inscription appears to be in latin or maybe very old french i'm sure there'll be some experts out there please let me know in the comments if you can decipher what this tablet is saying i would be very interested to know so with the barrier varnish now dry it's time to start looking at retouching in those damaged areas so the main damage is on his cheek a little bit under his eye and then some of those areas that are over cleaned so to do this i'm going to use my restoration chips these are ground pigments and they're held in a conservation grade resin and then it's a very particular solvent that is used to disperse this so what i like to do is just kind of build up some layers first build up some tones that are going to be used in the painting and for this i'm using a little bit of cadmium red i've got some burnt sienna a little bit of titanium white and i'll use elements of burnt umber and some yellow ochre as well now looking back at this these chips are well used and sometimes it can work in your favor if there's little bits of colors in there i always tend to find that there's rogue elements in some of your retouchings and there's colors that you don't think would be in there so sometimes a scruffy pot helps you out and when i was learning restoration sometimes you just could not match a color you just couldn't find the exact tone and you just had to experiment by adding different pigments so by reading what the palette is of the artist so what tones he's used you can build up kind of different color swatches that you can introduce and then hopefully by just catching one of those pigments or bringing it into your mix you match that tone perfectly so yeah i always found that by just adding a color you might not even think of if it was present on the palette the artist might have just touched his brush along there and brought that into his paint mixture so even though it would be nice to have a perfectly clean palette pot sometimes it does work in your favor to unlock some of these tones now this is all first pass building up layers so i'll just be blocking in looking at the tones that are around that damage and then first pass going over the top and blocking them in so yes his cheek on the left hand side isn't perfect i'll come back to that and the same with this little element here now on his right cheek i haven't refilled i wanted to see what the original filler was like but i do think i can see a little shadow on there so i may have to go back and see if that requires some extra filling so once i've put back some of these small little flecks and dots on this side i'll take a closer look at that area too now his eye also has lost a little bit of pigment not too much so again just the tiniest little dots and dabs to push that back that's enough just to make that hole again and not distressing some fabulous highlights on those eyes they really are um and just going to have a closer look at that damaged area now and you can see there is a little indentation there that is casting a shadow so i'm going to fill that and then my retouchings will sit better on it so again this is a conservation grade filler it's both soluble in water and white spirit i don't know how that works but i find it really easy to work with so any excess is taken off i'll let that dry then once it's fully dry i'll go over with the swab again and get a nice flat tone i'm just going to readdress that so this is second pass now on that area and i can just match those colours a lot better and push that completely back and again here second pass bringing those tones in now to to balance that whole area and try as best as i can to make that damaged area blend in with the original paint so lots of tiny little strokes these restoration um chips they dry extremely quick 10-15 seconds you can't blend them like oil paint so you have to build up lots of little layers and feather them in so again just the tiniest little strokes or glaze to push that back and then with that filler dry i can remove the excess so that the fill is just in the recess and then again i'll do a first pass on this and then i'll come back and do a second pass as well in his gown area we could see this evidence of over cleaning um underneath the varnish and through uv so this is where the painting has been cleaned in the past some of the solvent cleaner by the previous cleaner may have taken off a little bit of that green pigment the green is invariably quite a soft pigment and does remove fairly easily so as they've cleaned they've just taken off the tops so the canvas um texture the top raised areas are the first to come off and that's what all these little white areas are so i've mixed my color tone and again rather than painting over that whole section with large brush strokes i'm just using very small tiny little dots or lines just to cover and make them less visible from viewing distance and the same in some of these underpainted areas of these brown tones there's an awful lot of canvas showing through on these so i'll just go over and push those back as well now i quite like the way this looks i think there's a real luminescence to this gown uh the way the artist has built up his tone so i'm not looking to replace here i'm just looking to consolidate and make it look whole again because i like that light coming from from his beard and from his gown so i'm not going to do too much on there so this is where he stands now he's been relined he's been placed onto the new stretcher and restretched he's been fully cleaned he's been varnished and i've done my retouchings now so this is the point where the painting is probably 95 98 there i'll view this i might come back and address a few little issues but he looks so much better he looks so much more vibrant and the light emitting from his beard and from that gown yes there's history there yes there's elements of the the age of the painting showing but i don't want to hide that i want to keep that as original as possible i'm really pleased with how it's come out this tablet yes it's not perfect but at least it's legible now and you can read it so here's the before how it arrived cockled damaged falling off the stretcher in a really bad way almost ready to be consigned to the to the dustbin for some people and this is how he comes out now fully cleaned fully restored those colors are a lot more vibrant we know who he is he's been identified and it's just a really really nice devotional painting and it looks great right guys i'm afraid that's all we've got time for this week i hope you enjoyed the restoration work we did on this uh gentleman it i think it's fabulous i think there's a real luminescence to it now it's really glowing and the colors have come through i've got all that lovely underpaint and as i said i didn't want to do too much retouching on him i just wanted him to be preserved as he as he is um welcome to all my new subscribers thank you for subscribing and supporting the channel and i just wanted to say we passed 50 000 i'm absolutely amazed that video last week the weather video went crazy it's had over 500 000 views which is just mental and we've picked up some new subscribers on the way so welcome guys all your new youtube subscribers thanks for joining and supporting the channel um i've got some more paintings coming they're all in the rack ready to go so stick around if you are enjoying the content i've got a fabulous story attached to probably the next painting that i do coming up very soon um weather in manchester today it's kind of cold and windy a bit blowy but sunny feels more like early april than may but i do believe that summer is coming so anyway hope you enjoyed the video hope you have a lovely weekend and i will see you all on the next one okay guys take care see you soon bye