Gilded Once Again Part 1

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Signs of wealth in the pottery, the carved wood, and the detailed painting within speak to opulence. There are, however, issues, aside from being dirty and discolored varnish sitting atop this painting. Crackle or throughout, there are a myriad of old repairs indicating some damage befell this painting in the past, and its current condition, while somewhat stable, is precarious and won't get better on its own. Taking a look at the back of the painting reveals some of those old repairs. Massive patches, some errant wood across the back, and signs that somebody was here doing, well, who knows what. All of this will have to be contended with, removed, the problems sorted, and the painting put back together, if we are to honor the work of Pauline Palmer and the wishes of the sitters who commissioned such a grand and glorious portrait. 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So head over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash Baumgartner to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I'll begin by removing this painting from its stretcher support, and here I have to contend with a suite of fasteners. Here we have some staples that were crudely applied, and then we come to what looks like a crossbar, and this is also pretty crudely applied. This is going to get removed and likely be replaced later on, because this isn't doing the painting any favors. Because it's nailed in place, it effectively renders the stretching ability of this stretcher moot. So it's a problem, and it has to go. And it takes a little while for it to go. Those nails are in there. Once I have removed all of these myriad of staples from the back, I can then begin removing the tacks from the side. Now the tacks come out relatively easily, there are staples here as well, but ultimately it doesn't matter. All of this has to go because the painting needs to be separated from this support. I'm going to need to do several treatments on the hot table to address all of the myriad of issues, and those just can't be done while the painting is on the support. It takes a little time to go through and get all of these out, but there's no faster or easier way to do it. In the past I've seen conservators, well people who claim to be conservators, simply cut the painting off of the support, but that's not how we do it. Once all those fasteners are removed, I can lift up the old stretcher and set it aside. It needs to be cleaned, examined, and modified, but we'll deal with that later. For right now, I want to start taking these patches off the back. Wherever possible, I'll try to peel off the material that's adhered to the canvas without any solvents or water or anything. Doing it dry keeps extra solvent and material away from the painting, and this one does yield eventually, but it takes a little bit of effort. This is what appears to be white lead as an adhesive, which is really strong, it's just paint after all, so I have to use a solvent gel to dissolve it. This solvent gel will sit on the surface, it gets covered with the mylar so it doesn't evaporate, and then after, oh, a little bit of time, I can come back with a scalpel and start scraping it off. And you can see it comes off fairly easily. Anybody who has stripped paint from furniture knows exactly what I'm talking about. But there is another layer of white lead, and this one is more tenacious. So more solvent gel, and then more scraping. This one is not coming off as easily, which is unfortunate, but it does yield eventually. I can chip it away with the scalpel, and you can see most of it is coming up. It will take more work and more effort than the first layer, but ultimately that's just how it goes. Sometimes we get really lucky, and it comes off really quickly, and sometimes we have to work for it. Either way, we'll get it done. And I'm always surprised to see how big of a patch for such a small tear. Now speaking of big patches, this one is gigantic. And this is not white lead, this is some sort of modern synthetic adhesive, something that was bought at a hardware store, and it is gooped and gobbed all over the place. I tested this against every single solvent that I have in the studio, and nothing caused it to budge. Nothing even softened it in the least. So I don't know what adhesive this was, but thankfully, you can see how most of it wasn't actually making contact with the painting. So thankfully, the low quality of work here has saved me from potentially a really disastrous situation. I have found in my many years of doing this work that while I curse low quality work because it's not good, it is often that haphazard, uninformed, well, laziness or sloppiness that saves us in the end. Because the people who do this work don't actually know what they're doing, they don't know how to create a good bond or to use really good adhesives. So we end up getting a little bit lucky in the end. Luckily, I was not with this adhesive and all of my scraping with the scalpel yielded very little results. That adhesive was so tenacious. So I'm putting on my mask and my goggles and I'm taking my power tool to the painting. This is a Fordham, a precursor to a Dremel tool, and I'm taking a grinding bit and simply grinding off this adhesive. Now you can see just how hard it is that a steel grinding bit is needed to break this free and this is kind of ridiculous. Taking a power tool to a painting is something I don't want to do ever, but there are times when, well, this is the answer and this is one of those cases. I broke several scalpel blades trying to slice and scrape off this adhesive and it became dangerous to me because when those blades break, they're sharp and I don't want that. It also became dangerous to the painting because if one of those blades breaks or slips, it could cut the canvas. So in this case, I had to use this Fordham tool. Now luckily for me, the Fordham tool did a fantastic job and made quick work of most of that adhesive. There is still a lot of adhesive left and I can't take that grinding tool to the bare canvas. It's just too aggressive and too dangerous. So I'll come back and I'll scrape and scrape and then I'll apply a solvent gel to the area where the adhesive maybe made contact or just a little bit of contact and hope that it softens it up enough that I can come back with a scalpel and remove that last fine layer of adhesive that remains on the painting. I have removed thousands of patches in my time as a conservator. This is maybe the most frustrating patch I've worked on and I'm only at the back. Lord knows what's going to be on the front. There is another patch here. This is a crude attempt at a strip lining and this also needs to go. So just like with the others, I'm going to peel it back without applying any solvent or water. This one is really well bonded down and it takes a lot of effort for me to peel this back. Luckily the canvas and the painting are strong and stable. This is not always possible on really really fragile paintings and if this painting couldn't handle this approach I wouldn't do this. So with that removed we can see how much fill-in is on the painting. This is all paint loss and well canvas loss and instead of replacing it with an inlay of canvas they just filled it in retouched it so this will all go eventually. Again I'm applying a solvent gel to the surface of this adhesive which again is probably white lead and dissolving it underneath a piece of mylar and then the scraping will commence. Now I let this one sit for a little bit longer because well why not and boy you can see just how effective that solvent gel is. I don't really even need my scalpel this is just peeling right up which makes me believe that this maybe isn't white lead that this is maybe an acrylic ground layer or paint layer that was on the canvas. My guess is that whoever did this used a pre-primed canvas with an acrylic ground or gesso layer and that's what's coming off right now. And again we don't use pre-primed canvases this is why. And now to remove this after making some tests I've discovered that this adhesive is water soluble so I'm spraying some water on it and using a piece of mylar to protect the raw canvas and then more scraping and more scraping. Now the reason that I chose not to use laponite which I normally would for water-based adhesives during this removal process is number one I wanted to show you that there's another way and number two the volume of laponite that I would need to make to remove all of this would be astounding and it's expensive and I don't want to waste that material. On top of which this is all on the tacking edge so I'm not terribly concerned about any distortion that happens with exposure to water. Also there's really no paint on this area so I don't have to worry about losses. Now once I've removed the majority of the old adhesive I'll come back with some more water and a toothbrush and scrub off all the excess and then remove it with a cotton ball. I'll then pat it dry with some shop towels and move on to the next section continuing to remove all of that excess adhesive residue and cleaning up the back of this canvas. Once I've removed all of it I'll then come back with my vacuum and clean off all of the debris that is around and on the painting getting all of the dust the dirt all the old adhesive just everything off of it and then finally I'll place a piece of blotter paper on the area that I removed the water-based adhesive and I'll put some weights on it just so that as it dries it stays flat the blotter paper will absorb the ambient moisture and make sure that we don't get ripples or wrinkles or other distortions. Now this painting is going on the hot table so if we do get some minor distortions it really isn't a big deal we can get rid of those on the hot table but making sure that we don't have major ones makes the next step a little bit easier. A few days later I can then pick up the painting and transfer it over to the hot table to proceed with the aforementioned treatment. I'm using the big hot table here because I need 1.21 gigawatts actually just because it's big and this is a big painting. I'll lay it down on the paper and then I will cover it with the mylar once I have gone around and made sure that all of the edges are down. I'll remember this time to put the cotton webbing which allows me to suck out the air and create positive pressure down on the surface of the painting. Without this there really is no point in this treatment because what we want to do here is use heat, ambient moisture that the canvas has absorbed, and pressure to effectively iron out all of the distortions. This is the same thing as ironing a shirt it's just extremely more controlled and precise and we can do it on a wholesale level. Once the through bag connectors are attached I can turn on the vacuum pump and remove all of that air. You can see we now have good positive pressure. Any wrinkles can be rolled out with a little wood roller and they're gone. What we do see however is the area where the repair was. Look at how pronounced that is. That is all fill-in material. It's just crazy that it's there. Once the table's come up to temperature the painting has allowed to heat soak for a little bit and then cooled I'll remove the painting from the envelope, remove the paper, and then put it down on my table, lay some felt over it to protect the surface, and press it. And now we can start with cleaning this painting and finding out what's really underneath all of this grime. I made some tests earlier on and discovered that there really isn't much surface grime to contend with so I'm going to go right ahead to removing the old varnish layer. And I've tested and mixed a solvent mixture that is safe and effective on this painting. Using a rolled swab I can start to lift off that discolored varnish and reveal, boy, well, that is quite the revelation. This old varnish has oxidized over time and turned yellow and it's, well, obscuring the original colors. Some people call this patina. It's not. It's just dirt the same way that a yellow ring around the collar of your white shirt is not patina. It's just dirt. And we want to remove it because we want to see what the artist intended us to see, all of these beautiful and glorious colors. So working slowly in controlled fashion in like colors to prevent the risk of any removal of color, because sometimes one color is different than the other, I'll proceed cleaning this painting. And even our little painting in a painting gets proper conservation. And this meta-conservation, I suppose, brought a smile to my face. Now on to the final section, the area of repair. I've left that for last because, well, I know it's going to be a Herculean task. And as I remove all of the varnish, some, but not all, of the overpainting comes with. And, well, we're going to get into it in just a minute. And this was one of the more unpleasant and frustrating experiences I've had in a very long time. I knew that there was a ton of fill-in. We saw that when the painting was on the vacuum table, just how pronounced it was. So I'm starting off with a brand new scalpel blade, and I'm just going to try to chip away some of this fill-in, just to see how deep it really goes, how much is on this painting. The first few chips and passes go pretty well. And you can see it's really, really, really thick. It's also really brittle. This is not a standard fill-in material like I would use, which, while is rigid, not this much. It yields pretty easily to a sharp knife. This is something else. And what this is, is white lead. Actually, several layers. You can see them all here. One layer of white lead, then a layer of green, then another layer of white lead, then another layer of paint, and so on and so forth. This is a seven-layer dip of bad actions, in the form of fill-in. So I continue on with my scalpel, chipping away. But this is very, very slow, and not really all that effective. You can see that I'm not really getting anywhere. The problem is, is that white lead, when it's this thick, probably a quarter of an inch, is really, really rigid, and it's almost impossible to delicately chip and slice it away. I'm trying my best, but it's just not that efficient. So I come back with my tool, and I try to remove some of it. I've removed a little bit, but I don't want to go any further. So now I try a solvent gel, which can, sometimes, soften up the white lead, as we saw previously. But there's just so much of it here, that even after multiple passes, it's really not yielding all that much. It would take me 30 or 40 passes, and then, I don't know, that seems ridiculous. In any event, I keep working away at it with the scalpel, trying different techniques, and eventually, I do get all of this fill-in off. And while I was hoping that there would be a ton of paint left over underneath, and that the repair wouldn't have been so extensively necessary, what I find is that the canvas and the painting is really, really bad. The tear is really bad, I have to dig out all of that old glue, and the paint loss is pretty extreme. Now, this may be because something hit it really violently, and the paint just flaked off, or this may be a result of the previous conservation. Either way, I still have to contend with it. And you can see just how much fill-in was on that little tear. It's kind of amazing. This will go down in the books as one of the worst things I've ever seen. And now, it's time to flip the painting over and get access to the back of the canvas. All of that working, removing the fill-in material, has left the canvas, by the tear, kind of wavy, and I need to get rid of that. I could put it back on the hot table, but that's just too extreme for such a small area. It's like putting a whole arm in a cast for a broken finger. So what I'll do is dampen a piece of blotter paper, and then press it locally, and I'll change these blotter papers out periodically throughout the next coming days to speed up the drying process. And then, let's take a step back and remember where we started, because next time, we're going to put it all back together.