Conserving Joshua Reynolds: The Master Portrait Painter

Joshua Reynolds was one of the most celebrated artists in the history of British art. Through his painting and teaching, he dominated artistic life in Britain in the mid to late 18th century. Anyone who was anyone was painted by Reynolds. Over the course of a career spanning 50 years, he transformed what a portrait could be, and in his role as founder-president of the Royal Academy, through his teaching and art theories, he shaped the school of British art well into the 19th century. English Heritage cares for many works by Reynolds, 17 of which are at Kenwood. To understand more about Reynolds as an artist, and in time for his 300th birthday in 2023, we've been closely examining four of the paintings from Kenwood, and our conservators have been treating two of them. So one of the paintings that we've been looking at is possibly the last portrait that Reynolds worked on. It's of Miss Cox and her niece, and we knew it was very yellow, we knew it hadn't been treated for a long time, and we were keen to have a look and see if we could make any improvements. One of the things that we know about Reynolds' technique is, as conservators, it makes our life very difficult because the materials that he used to paint can be very susceptible to the sorts of solvents that we would normally use to clean a painting. So we have to be really careful that anything that we decide to take off is definitely not by him. He was renowned for coming back to his pictures and fiddling with them after perhaps he'd already varnished them and putting further layers of paint on top of varnish layers. He'd also sometimes mix the varnish in with his oil paint, which makes it tremendously difficult to really work out that what we're taking off is really something that shouldn't be there. So one of the things that was quite interesting when we cleaned the painting, or started the process of cleaning the painting, is the area of the landscape had been really heavily disfigured by a very thick layer of darker varnish, and removing that re-established the fact that the sitter is sitting on a stone bench with a landscape in the distance behind it, and the cooler tones that we have regained as a process of this cleaning really make a lot more sense now in the composition. This painting by Reynolds is of Master Philip York. It was painted in 1787. It's got this very yellow varnish on it, and the varnish is quite degraded now, and we wanted to look at whether that could be removed safely. First of all, I looked with ultraviolet light, which is really helpful for looking at the surface layers of the painting. You can also see there are some darker areas. These are areas of retouching. We knew that it was treated in the 1990s, a wax polish had been put on, and then it was treated before that in the 1950s by a restorer called Buttery. I had a really good look at it under the microscope, and I could work out that a very old layer had been put on the painting, which was a sort of toned varnish layer, and when we did the medium analysis on them, we found that they did contain pine resin, which is quite unusual, and then further analysis was done on the paint layers themselves, and that was found to contain oil plus this pine resin again. So, unusual to have pine resin, and it indicated that probably that layer was put on by Reynolds himself. The pine resin layer is very similar to the glaze layers that Reynolds applied finely, so they were mixed with oil and resin, and they're very thin and delicate, so I don't think it's possible to clean the painting any further. However, that doesn't mean that in the future, there might be another way, another technique that comes available, and we've learned an awful lot about the painting and his technique.