Old Master Painting Damaged in Shipping

This very nice old master painting came into the lab yesterday with a gouge that occurred during shipping. A little magic of consolidating the flaking, filling the indentation, inpaint (careful accurate retouching with a varnish based paint) and carefully applied local varnish (along with 35 years of experience) made the scratch disappear.

Still, in this case, with a little better quality crate and better mounting of the painting into its period frame... this damage and its cost and bother could have been totally avoided.

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Cleaning Paintings - Often A Surprise Even For Us

We just got into the lab a wonderful painting that was shown in the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. My goodness, this painting has been through tough times! We'll talk more about all the problems later but today, in our process of doing the estimate, we did cleaning tests to help us decide how willingly the varnish layers would dissolve and if that process would be dangerous to the original paint.


Even though we've been doing this since 1975, its often a surprising moment when we see the clean spot. The contrast is sometimes unexpected, perhaps like the beginning tests on the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel. We are careful to use solvents that won't attack the original paint. We also use, often, magnifiers to help us see more detail. Sometimes we need to test separately all the different colors to make sure one color will not dissolve unexpectedly while we are using a solvent. Get a look at these tests:

The "white" spots on this photo are where we have removed the dark brown varnish to reveal the original color of the dress. But here's something that you might not have noticed: See how the knee and the dress below the knee is kind of fuzzy or out of focus? Well, that's because its been repainted in previous restorations. The repainting was poorly done and WAY too abundantly. In fact, in the two cleaning tests where we tested to see if the repainting would come off, there was no damage below the retouching... we revealed original color in perfect condition.


You can imagine what a difference this cleaning will make: brighter colors, better depth of field and better contrast in the composition... a return to the original look and intent of the artist in 1903.




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Can you clean artwork with a potato and onion? This was ALREADY cleaned once!

Can you believe that someone already restored this painting and cleaned it in the process?! I have actually been asked if cleaning a painting's dirty varnish and grime is done with a slice of potato! That's right... I've also been asked if a slice of onion works. (sigh... unbelievable...) Ok, here are a couple of tips besides DON'T use a slice of potato or onion (they'll encourage mold and bacteria in the cracks of your artwork... and they don't work): Don't ever use an off the shelf cleaner (ie 409, Windex etc.). So actually my tip is not how to do it... its what NOT to do if you value your artwork! More artwork is damaged by inept cleaning than any other source of damage! (there sure are a lot of exclamation points in the blog entry... sorry!)


Look at the difference in this varnish and crud removal! Wow... we do this all the time and WE are still surprised to see the beautiful color unveiled and appear from the depths below.

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