I Restored a Damaged Painting She Inherited From Her Father

I'm at Lisbon at the moment and unfortunately I'm far away from my studio and I don't have any of my restoration materials with me, so I thought this would be the perfect time that I could go back to one of the most interesting projects I had to restore during this year. When this 19th century painting arrived in my studio it had some serious problems the paint was lifting from the canvas there was a hole that required structural reconstruction and years of dirt and old varnish were hiding the original colors i originally documented this restoration in three separate episodes but today i want to show you the entire process as one complete restoration so let's go back to the beginning this painting came to me with a story its owner had inherited it from her father after he passed away and because of that the painting had become much more than simply an artwork it was something that connected her to him unfortunately an accident happened the painting fell and the impact punctured the canvas leaving a hole and disturbing the surrounding paint layers when it arrived at my studio my task was not simply to make the damage disappear I wanted to preserve as much of the original painting as possible and return something very meaningful to its owner and that is where this restoration began this painting is signed by Dolf van Roy he was a Belgian painter and he lived between 1858 and 1943 he painted mainly landscapes portraits and interiors and this painting is an example of an interior that he painted we can see here the damage and the damage is this hole but this hole made also instable the the paint layer that we can see those are not cracks they are a sign that the paint is coming off of the canvas so it's important that we make a procedure to make the the paint layer to adhere to to glue again to to the canvas and to stabilize this area i will use i will apply some glue this glue is based on a gelatin that i recover with some air bladders of a fish and this creates this glue that it's very very powerful and with the protection of mounting wax I can apply some warm over it and this makes possible the glue to to read here to to the canvas it is necessary to do several areas but the heating and the glue do really work perfectly and we when we remove the the Melinex we can also compare with how before how was before and how now we have the results so the the area is totally totally stable the paint layer is glue again to the to the canvas and the crackle is not visible anymore and what I do I will leave it with Melinex a little bit of felt and also some weights because this will allow the temperature and the the canvas to get in an equal state to the ambient the whole by the back looks with a lot of fibers and but those fibers are not enough to to give resistance to the even if I put them together or I try to re-glue them it's not a a good idea and a good solution so the best is to to clean the the hole and i'm going to try the incrustation so what i'm going to do i'm going to to to to make first a mold in paper that will be exactly the form of the of the hole that i have here on the canvas and this this paper will serve as a mold with the shape that i can use to to get the the canvas i also draw a draw a arrow so i know the direction of the of the mold and i cut i could do almost directly with the canvas under but actually uh i need to learn that i should do like this and i do it now i try to see if it really fits correctly i try to press and i think it needs a little bit of adjustment but i can do it and now i have a piece of canvas and i'm gonna redraw and then I can cut again and I get the piece of canvas that I'm going to incrustrate on the on the hole. Here I also draw the arrow so I know the direction. I tried also when I do incrustrations I also try to to follow the direction of the threads so they match also the direction of the threads of the painting and when it is totally adjusted it's important to press it correctly I will use a special adhesive this adhesive that I'm using here that i'm applying here is the is called thermotextile and is a powder that i apply especially on the areas of contact between the the the incrustation piece and the original painting and i tried to to put this adhesive on the edges and then this adhesive reacts with the heat so it dissolves it's almost like a plastic and it dissolves and it glues both parts the original painting and the incrustation actually i do apply two times so i get a better result normally this is enough so i let it cool for a little while and then i remove carefully the Melinex and i see that it's perfect you can see on the other side that is totally closed and the threads are aligned i could leave it only like that that is secured but because there was an area near the the stretcher that was not so strong i do apply also some threads on on the bridging technique uh those threads are normal threads of uh of canvas that i do apply with uh with the help of an adhesive this is another kind of adhesive that i'm using here and i do apply them also So in this direction trying to follow also the threads of the original painting. I apply a little bit of Melinex over it so it can dry, but to dry I also have to apply a little bit of felt and again some weight over it. will stay like this for several hours when when it comes the time to remove i i do remove the the heavy piece and the the felt completely now stable and it's much more with resistance now and the hole is totally totally closed and now we advance to the cleaning and this painting in fact it's not heavily dirty and also the varnish is not old or very very yellow so what I'm going to do I'm going to use a solution that is based on water and also with the cleaning agent that I am going to use a dilution of 2% and first I will need to to make a small test just to be sure that this solution is effective to remove any deposits or any dirt that our painting has we can see that this painting has a lot of impasto so i'm just going to perform a test just to see if the if the cotton swab just get some dirt and we can see here the solution starts to clean we can see it doesn't come that heavy dirt but it comes enough to to make a difference so we can notice now there's an area there that really really shows that although it's not so heavy the dirt is there and needs to be removed so i'm going to perform the cleaning on the painting the painting is clean and we do have a very good result it's a beautiful painting this impasto and those shoes are just amazing the the the treatment that i'm going to apply now is just to to give a better adhesion for the next product that i do apply so we have here totally raw canvas and over this canvas i'm going to apply this gesso that i did dilute a little bit so this will be the the ground layer that i do apply i apply literally in all the area but also in small little areas that there do have some abrasions and i do finish all the area with a gesso a white gesso but here now i apply the putty and this putty i did apply some color to it so it could match as a good ground for the retouching and And when it's dry, or almost dry, I start to clean the excess. We do have several areas that need to be cleaned. Before I sit down at the easel, I always take time to build the color palette in harmony with the painting. And preparing these tones in advance saves a great deal of time during the retouching process. It allows me to establish the base colors I will need, and later, adjust them gradually as the work progresses. Here I'm using dry pigments, carefully mixed with a synthetic resin based varnish. The retouching colors I apply are fully reversible. This means that any future conservator who may work on this painting will be able to remove my intervention without difficulty. And I'm going to start the integration. So the integration starts by applying here the lines that define the tiles on the floor. Those will give me guidelines to apply the retouch and these help me more accurate While the retouch dries, I have here the frame and I'm going to check it because it may need to have some kind of small restorations. This is a really, really beautiful frame and I can see that in fact it's in very good condition. There is no major issues, there are no broken ornaments on it. The only thing that I see, it's a very small detail, and it is here that a little bit of the gold leaf was lost here. And there is this small detail here that it's broken, this area. So I probably will reconstitute, make a reconstitution on this. is a gold leaf frame so probably it's water gilding. Take care first of this and I will take care of this area here also. So I am preparing here the filling for this area here. As a ground layer I have to dissolve a little bit of this product also I just dissolve a little bit of this product and when I have this more liquid I apply here over the wood so when I apply the filling it will have a better adhesion base. Now I'm going to start by applying the filling here. Sometimes my hands work a little bit better than the tools. They apply also here and now it dries and the next step is applying the gold leaf. I have here the gold leaf but this is not real gold this is a metal leaf so what I'm going to do you cannot breathe you are not allowed to breathe when you work with gold leaf so I'm going now to apply in this area I have here the glue this This is water gilding, what I'm doing. So this glue is based on water and gelatin glue. This is squirrel hair. So I press with this brush, I press on the area. When it's dry, I can remove the excess, those areas that are excess. just going to cut a little bit more for this area here. I apply again the glue. This is a smaller one. It's enough for this area. I press again with this brush. What I'm going to do is just to apply a little bit of varnish in this area, the new one that I did apply, just to give a little bit more old patina although we can almost not notice the difference and now that the the frame is repaired it's time to apply the varnish, the final varnish that i'm applying here is a resin and i apply in the entire painting because uh i it's not a good idea and not a good procedure just to apply on the area that i did make the the reconstitution and the integration that you can see here it's important to apply in the whole surface of the painting this gives a better and more uniform look so it's a better procedure to to make it like that when i pass the the brush over the varnish that is already a little bit dry i can feel on my brush that it's already getting a little bit more difficult to to stretch the the varnish but this means that the varnish is getting small small details on the relief that will make the light refract in a very beautiful way and once the varnish is totally dry i can reassemble the painting and its frame and this is a very special moment because now that the painting is reintegrated now it's a moment that we can reunite again the painting and see the beautiful result. In the first episode I presented you this painting with a hole in the canvas. Today I present you the painting fully integrated and restored. This was a process that required a lot of time, patience and precision. On the left the painting as it arrived, marked by damage and interruption. On the right, after careful restoration, stable, integrated and visually unified. The goal was never to erase its history, but to restore its harmony. Thank you very much for watching. I wish you a wonderful week. take care and I'll see you on the next restoration bye