Coming Home

This video is brought to you by MagellanTV, a new documentary streaming service founded by filmmakers whose mission is to tell great stories that have defined the human experience. You know, obviously the most important part of any painting is the image. After all, that's why we look at paintings. But as objects, these things can lead pretty interesting lives, particularly if they're storied. Well, welcome to the studio, Mike and Koki. Thank you for bringing this painting in. Tell me a little bit about it. Well, it's had a long journey. It came to me through Mike's daughter. She found it on eBay, and we were traveling from Colorado to return to Illinois, talking on the phone. She said, I found a painting by John Harrison Mills, who is your great-grandfather? Yes, and her great-great-grandfather. And her great-great-grandfather. So it became a focus of family attention right away. It came from New York City, and it will come this Saturday after we would do back. That's what we were expecting. We went down on Saturday morning. No box. Call the people in New York. No, we sent it. We caught it. Start going through FedEx from their viewpoint, which they weren't clear in telling me it was delivered. So I'm getting more and more anxious, more and more frustrated. And I finally turn to the city police. I live in a condominium building, and there are cameras on the front door and the lobby. The policeman and the custodian got together. They began on the date of the delivery and went through and went through. They didn't have to go very far because they got the film of the man coming out of the FedEx truck in front of the building, carrying this. You picked it up. It's heavy. Carrying this thing up and into and putting down as they should have in the lobby. It turned out that they saw other things on the film. Somebody stole the painting out of the lobby. Somebody just took the box and walked away. So one day, I just happened to go downstairs as the policeman I'd been working with came to the door to meet me. He said, I have news for you. I said, you found it? You found it? He said, come with me. He wouldn't say yes or no. Oh God, this guy is playing it close to the chest. We go up in the elevator to the third floor, which is the floor I live on. It came off and there's the second policeman standing with this gigantic box. And I said, got it. You found it. You found the box. They carried it in. It was in somebody else's apartment. Your neighbor took your box. Apparently. The man was expecting some exercise equipment. Oh, come on. So he took up two boxes. So after FedEx, eBay not helping you out, after getting it from New York, after it going into the bowels of FedEx and then finally getting delivered, where it was stolen by your neighbor, thinking that it was exercise equipment. And then the police got involved, orchestrated the sting and finally returned her to you. Yes. Isn't that a dream? To say the least. Speaking of the painting, let's get it out of this frame so that we can take a closer look at it. Yeah. Because right now she's sitting under a layer of pretty grimy, dirty glass, which actually isn't necessary for the painting. The problem is, is that the glass gets kind of grimy on the inside as well as the outside and it kind of obfuscates. Oh, there you are. So for having quite the journey, she is actually in really good condition. There are some issues. You can see that the paint has really cracked horizontally. We have some losses along the edges, a couple of little losses in her face. She's also pretty dingy, pretty dirty. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty, pretty evident. And so cleaning her up, taking care of the structural issues should make it, make the painting not only sounder for the next generation, but also enable us to make the painting look better. If you look here, you can see that there is this fine canvas that's tacked down and then a heavier weight canvas onto which the painting was executed, tacked on top of it. So I wonder if maybe he reused the stretcher support and just cut the canvas off. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting mystery. I wonder if this painting had been worked on in the past or what's going on there. We'll have to figure this out. What's your idea about the frame? Is it anywhere near the era? I don't think that the frame is original to the painting. I think it's also a little opulent for the painting. This is a very European frame, but you know, that happens over time. People reframe things. They want it to look a different way, fit in with their home decor. But I think that this painting, given how important it is, probably would deserve and benefit from a frame that complements it a little bit more. Both in tone and size. Yeah, absolutely. This is a great frame for another painting, but not for her. So maybe that's something to consider down the line once she's all conserved. Well, she has had a long journey here. She certainly has. To say the least. And hopefully this next chapter is going to be a little less rocky. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing all about it. I'm looking forward to helping you get her in her rightful home. Thank you. John Harrison Mills was always an artist, but before he could devote his life to that work, he was a soldier in the Civil War. During the Second Battle of Bull Run, Mills took a bullet in the leg and was evacuated to a field hospital, where he participated in the extraction of said bullet with the doctors. Reports were that he nearly died, and after four months of recovery, he earned the nickname, The Man Who Would Not Die. As an artist, illustrator, poet, and writer, Mills cataloged and captured many of the experiences and stories of soldiers fighting in the war that defined America. On MagellanTV, Civil War, The Untold Story breaks new ground by examining America's Civil War through the lens of the Western campaign and provides new insights into the causes of the conflict, the homefront, and the opposing politics between the Union and Confederacy. MagellanTV is a new type of documentary streaming service created by filmmakers to showcase the most interesting documentaries available. With everything in 4k, ad-free, and over 3,000 options, ranging from history, true crime, art and culture, biography, nature, science and technology, and more, there is bound to be something for you. Head over to try.magellantv.com slash Baumgartner Restoration or click the link in the description below to take advantage of this offer and try something different. Though certainly not in as poor condition as many of the pieces in my studio, this painting will benefit from conservation. Having never been cleaned or worked on in the past, it's a bit worse for wear. But conservation isn't just about undoing damage and correcting the mistakes of the past, it's also about future-proofing a painting. That is, making sure that for the next 100 years, this painting will exist in the best state possible and won't need further attention. And that's the primary focus of this job. Once the painting is off of the support, we can see that that mysterious layer of canvas that was peeking out from underneath is just the remnants of a tacking edge. It appears that this stretcher was used for a previous painting, and the painting removed, and then a new canvas, the one we're working on today, stretched onto it. This is not terribly uncommon, I have seen it many times in the past, and to this day. Stretchers are expensive, and artists will often reuse them. With all of the grime removed from the back of the canvas, I can flip it over and start considering cleaning it. Now I mentioned earlier that this painting had never been worked on in the past, which is great for a conservator. It means that we don't have to consider undoing any previous work, good or bad. We can just jump right in and start removing the surface grime. Here I'm using a neutral organic soap to break up the surface grime. The composition of this soap is such that it will not attack the paintings, it is neutral in pH, and it will just break down the surface grime. If this painting had or has varnish, this soap will not remove it. Once the soap has been allowed to sit and break down the accumulation, we can start to remove it with a mild solvent. And remove it we will. You can see just how dirty this painting really is. The surface grime that is on this painting can be described as soot, smoke, dust, ambient particulate, foreign matter, alien accumulation. Anything you want to call it is fine, but it's just grime. It's the accumulation of a hundred years of being in a home, being in storage, being transported, and just accumulating whatever it comes into contact with. But removing it reveals really beautiful colors, a great impasto, and some delft brushwork. This painting had no varnish on it. The artist never applied it, so I don't need to remove it. Instead, I can jump right over to the hot table and do a treatment to try to relax these canvas fibers and remove some of the distortions. Technically, these are called planar distortions, but we can call them bumps and ripples, waves, well, anything you like that catches the light and distracts from the painting. Creating an airtight envelope for the painting is pretty critical with the hot table because I am going to be heating this painting up with the addition of a little bit of moisture. And if I don't have an airtight seal, the painting will distort and the paint could start to detach from the canvas. Using a balsa wood brayer, I'm going to go over the canvas and just encourage some of those creases and cracks flatter. I don't need to use a lot of pressure. You can see that the hot table does that for me. Now, once the painting has been allowed to cool and is back at ambient room temperature, I can take it out of this envelope and transfer it over to another table where it will be pressed and allowed to acclimate to my studio environment over the course of a few days. This is a pretty critical step because the painting, having just been heated up and exposed to a little bit of moisture, has a higher moisture content than the atmosphere. And as that moisture evaporates, well, the canvas will begin to shrink and distort. And all of the work we did just now, removing distortions, will be for naught. So a piece of felt on top and underneath a sheet of drywall and some heavy weights and it can sit for a few days. At some point in the past, this stretcher broke and it did so at one of the corners at the joints, making the overall integrity of the support questionable. So rather than throwing it away, even though there's no historical writing on it, I'm going to repair it. It is wood, after all, and I can repair wood. Once I have removed a section of the wood, creating an area for a new piece to be set in and adhered, I can begin recreating that piece. I'll turn to my old stretcher stock and find one that matches the curve and profile of the existing stretcher and I will rip it down. A test fit reveals an almost perfect match. This repair should be permanent. I don't want this to ever come undone, so standard wood glue will be used here. I mentioned an almost perfect match, and a few passes of my hand plane will make it a perfect match. A few days later, I can remove the painting from the weights as it has had enough time to acclimatize to my studio's relative humidity. Because of this step, we won't have any flaking paint, we won't have any distortion, and the previous treatment we did on the hot table will not be a lost cause. At this point, I'm going to do some preventative maintenance on the painting. Because those cracks were very heavy and they went through the paint layer, I want to do something to minimize the chance that they do end up flaking in the future, so I'm going to do an adhesive impregnation. This step is often carried out once a painting has already started flaking, but it can be used to stabilize and prevent flaking in the future, which is precisely what I'm doing here. The adhesive is thinned out and rolled on to penetrate through the canvas up into those cracks and voids. Once the adhesive is dry, I can transfer it back over to the hot table and execute the treatment. The addition of heat will reactivate the adhesive, and the pressure will force it down into all of the canvas. Once it's done and the table's been cooled, I can remove it from the envelope and take it back to the front to finish out the structural treatments. This canvas's tacking edge was really, really weak. In fact, some of it detached, and I just don't trust it for fidelity when I re-stretch this painting. So I'm going to Rather than line the whole painting, which I deem unnecessary in this case, the simple addition of a strip of Belgian linen on the tacking edges will provide enough material and meat for the stretching and add some fidelity to that tacking edge to ensure that as the painting expands and contracts with humidity changes, it won't tear at this crease. Once the strip lining is complete and all four sides have added fidelity, I can turn to stretching the painting to the repaired support. I have secured the corners with nails, making sure that this stretcher is square and that it will not move as I tack the painting down. These nails will be removed later on, but skipping this step often yields a painting that is not square and can make a real headache for the framers. As the stretching is complete, the tidying up and completion can now take place. Using smaller, lighter weight tacks, I will fold over and tack down the extra canvas to the back of the painting. There are any number of ways to finish off a painting, and this is just the way that I choose to do it. But finishing it off is important. Not only does it signify a care and attention to detail and craftsmanship, but making sure that none of this canvas frays or deteriorates prematurely is important for the structural integrity of the work. New keys will be inserted where the old keys are lost, and they will be secured with fishing line, just to make sure that they don't ever become lost or slip down in between the canvas and create a bulge. Though this painting did not have major losses, there were a couple of spots where the paint did chip off, and it's important to fill those in before retouching. Oftentimes, raising the painting up to the light will help me identify areas that I might not have been able to see upon first pass. Once the fill-in medium has been allowed to dry, I can come and remove the excess with a little cotton swab and a little bit of water. Removing the excess is actually critically important because we don't want to retouch over the original paint, just where the paint was lost. For a painting like this, the retouching process is brief. It will not require an extreme amount of emotional or intellectual investment. That said, the retouching is no less important, and accurate color matching is critical. Even though nobody will ever think to look here for this damage, we still want to make sure that it blends away and that our eye doesn't catch it. Retouching can be exciting, exhausting, or both, and sometimes having a piece that requires very little retouching in the midst of pieces that require a lot is a nice reprieve. Touching up little spots that are distracting is also the purview of the conservator, trying to make sure that we don't see these little spots of damage, just the entirety of the piece. The varnishing process is where all of the work that has been done thus far comes together. We'll see anything that we missed, and we'll see all the fruits of our labor. Using a fully reversible pH... Using a fully reversible, synthetic, UV-stabilized varnish, and a thick brush, a thin layer of varnish is applied across the entire painting, and then worked to even out. Oftentimes, it will be necessary to relieve the brush and come back and remove excess varnish where it has pooled, so that the layer is nice, even, and consistent. Well, Koki, Mike, thank you once again for coming into the studio, and today obviously is a big day. You're going to get to see your painting as it should be seen, as you had hoped it would be seen. So, without further ado, let's just get right to it. I'm thrilled. Oh, I can't wait. I'm thrilled. We can hardly wait. All right, well, here we go. Oh, look. Look. Looks French, Mike. I'm still thinking she looks French. You think so? Yeah. Yes. Not really a relative, but done by my relative. So, a little bit of a change, wouldn't you say? Yeah, I would say so, and to see the background is kind of interesting. Very interesting. It stands out. Yeah, the brush stroke. Right, yeah, the impasto, the texture of the paint is really visible now, and that was a deliberate decision by him. He could have chosen a really flat, smooth background, but these are the kind of things that come across when a painting is conserved. The small little choices that the artist makes, yeah, it's their style, their feeling, their choices that you just can't see when the painting is dirty. Remember the painting when it came in, it was all kind of gray, kind of really muted. The painting is still a very tonal painting, but there are little hints. The blue in her medallion, you know, kind of the pinks in her cheeks, some of the reds in the shadows, those details, that subtlety was all missing beforehand, and now we can see it. And the brooch comes out so nicely. Yeah, absolutely. After being cleaned. Yeah, yeah. And it actually is another woman. I mean, suggests to my eye that it's another woman on the brooch. Yeah, probably a mother. Yep, that would be most likely, and it is the only point where there is a color that is a cool color. Everything else is really warm, everything else is very earth tones, and this is the only spot where we have blue. So to see it in its full, you know, blueness really makes a difference. It's a subtle, subtle change from beforehand, but beforehand it just kind of looked gray, and it was something that you wouldn't notice, but now you really capture kind of that color, and it really draws you in. And the other big change with the painting is the frame. Yeah, now when it came in, it had a big, chunky, totally inappropriate frame. Right. Do you remember the frame, Mike? No. It just wasn't doing the painting any favors. Yeah. And so something as simple as changing the frame and putting on something that would be period appropriate, a little bit more modest, toned to match the painting, totally changes the way that it comes across. Right. And this frame is really, really beautifully made. So we worked in conjunction, myself and the framers at Arman Lee, to make sure that the tones, these warm golds that are in her, were reflected back in the frame so that there was a synchronicity, that they speak to each other. That's really a testament to the framers and their skill in not only choosing a frame that's going to complement the piece, but also creating that frame. Choosing it is one thing, but then they have to actually make it. Oh my golly, this is wonderful. Yeah. I am so touched by all your generosity and all of the ways you have been generous with us. This is wonderful. Just incredible. Well, when I heard the story of how she came to you, I kind of felt I needed to be part of that. Part of that? Well, to make this experience have a happy ending. And now finally, she's ready to go back home where she belongs. And she's most welcome. It's a wonderful finale.