A New Look (part 1): Samuel F. B. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre

For Morris's vision of the Salon Carré, he sought out works in the Grande Galerie, the entrance to which features prominently in his final composition. This was one area of special concern for the conservators. I've begun the inpainting of this view into the Grande Galerie, and you can see where I've been inpainting from here over to here, and in the ceiling on down, and I've not yet inpainted in this zone, which shows some of the problems, and these include old retouching, which is much too dark, and really obscures the way the space works, but the patchy unevenness really hurts your ability to see into that central view. Before the painting was treated, there was a lot of confusion in this area, and maybe one way to describe it is as if you're listening to the radio and you're getting bad reception. Well, in visual terms, all of the little damages were the interference you hear, or in this case you see. So after we inpainted those areas, it was like fine-tuning your radio, and all sorts of details became clear again. We could see the figures much more clearly. There are figures that are now making sense in space. It's similar with the coffering in the ceiling, that one could hardly see this before because of old, badly damaged, and retouched areas, and now that we've very carefully taken care of those, you can see the faint pattern of the coffers that define the ceiling and help to allow the space to recede naturally.