Restoring the Doctor - Part 1- Assessing a 17th Century painting for restoration

Hi everybody, welcome back to the studio. Hope you're all well. Welcome to all my new subscribers and my new Patreon members. Thank you very much for supporting the channel. I hope you enjoyed the penultimate, well the final Regency Gents episode that we did and today we are going back about another 100 years. So we're going to go back to the 17th century. I've got a fabulous portrait that's attributed to the artist John Riley who was kicking around in the 1650s and 1640s and this painting is in for a clean and I think there may well be some retouching and restoration work that's required as well. So without further ado let's meet our next patient. Okay let's go. And here he is. So this is our late 17th century three quarters length portrait. We've got some information on the back of the canvas of who may have painted this and who it's of. Well very roughly who it's of. This is the condition that it's arrived in so you can see quite a yellowed varnish on the face there. We've got some marks and knocks and bangs to the portrait and already I can see just from viewing it that there's retouchings on the edge of the canvas there. You can see to the left this hand is noted in the label but does look a little odd. And again we've got this other clue. Hippoc for Hippocrates. So this references this is a portrait of a doctor which we have got on this label. John Riley. Certain stiffness in painting and hands may have been repainting. Value £1,000. We've got this stretcher bar mark probably from the liner who relined it and that says Jay Cooling and maybe a catalogue or auction number there as well. The stretch is really nicely made so whenever this was relined it was a good job well done. But again on the edges here you can see filler that's obviously been over painted and may have been removed at some point. That's where the canvas has laid on the stretcher bar and been retouched. It's a very thick glossy varnish over the whole painting. Hi everybody. Just a quick message from me to say thank you for supporting the channel those that do. I've done a little bit of maths and to make this work I need more Patreons. I need more people to be supporting the channel so I can do more restorations, more videos, more exciting content. So instead of just me saying why come and follow me on Patreon let me show you why. Early access videos add free at least three days before they go on YouTube. I'm going to be answering all questions now on Patreon one-to-one. Get in touch ask me what you like. I'm going to be doing some exclusive restorations that won't be on YouTube for at least six months. I've got some great paintings coming in. Live Q&A once a month. I'm scared but I'm going to do it and I've already got behind the scenes content what's going on in the studio. Also merch. I'm gonna get some merch. Fun stuff. I love fun and giveaways. Might be a painting, might be some tools, might be some merchandise. 400 Patreons. I'm going to do a random giveaway. I've been working on some merch and I've got these wonderful aprons. Bloomfield Art aprons. See that there? So 400 Patreons. As soon as I get there we'll do a random call and we'll see who gets this excellent Bloomfield Art restoration apron. Okay so that's why I think you should join Patreon. If you head over there now we've got some of your favourite episodes. Harriet Nichols, Henriette, the Regency Gents all up there. I've got behind the scenes footage up there. So come and join me on Patreon. Join the community and let's do some great videos. Okay guys let's get back to it. So now we'll have a look with the UV black light and see what shows up. So we've got little bits of retouching there on the cheek and in his lips there. That shows up darker. So any overpaint or historical retouchings that are quite fresh will show up under the UV light. So it's at the bottom, it's at the side, it's on his gloves. Basically the whole painting has been restored or retouched at some point. I've done my first test window there with my go-to solution and you can see on the left that it's removed the varnish quite well. But now I'm just double checking with a very weak solution just to see if there is any gains to be had from a different mixture. It's not making too much of a difference there. So again just increasing the strength of the mixture and finding the less strong mixture that will have the best impact. And this is it here. You can see the varnish removing there and taking us back to that base level of the paint. So a much larger swab now which will carry much more solution and you can see straight away there the varnish removing, saturating the swab and then just revealing that colour of that cravat straight away. Which is a very kind of cool crisp grey and white. So these are the stronger pigments which I always start with. The softer pigments are more susceptible to removal such as the browns and earth tones. So I always start with either the whites or if not whites the blues of a sky of a landscape painting. But here you can see as I'm removing the varnish there's small areas of dark ground showing through and a little bit of craquelure there at the bottom. This will be where the painting has dried over time and started to separate and create those little fissures. So I'm just going to take that same mixture down now to the cuffs of his shirt and again you can see that that solvent mixture is just removing nicely the varnish and leaving the original paint layer intact. I've already started researching this project and I've been looking at gloves in portraiture. So at the end of the 17th century gloves were very fashionable. It dictated that you were of like a higher level in society should we say. So a gloved hand was always kind of presented but for gentlemen the glove was removed when shaking hands but this was seen as vulgar. So the ladies always kept their gloves on and they had different kinds of leather gloves from kid gloves to some called chicken gloves and these were made from the leather of unborn calves to make sure that they were the softest leather you could get. So yeah another little rabbit hole I went down that I wasn't expecting. So this gentleman even though he's a doctor he's presented himself he's wearing the the gloves to show that he has got status but he's removing them to show that he's not working in those gloves it's just a status symbol and a mark of his place in society. This black area though just seems to be over painted. There's something going on with his hand and that thumb looks a little bit awkward. So I'll be taking my time to look at that later on and also as I'm cleaning I'm checking the swab because at some points on that blouse cuff there are elements of a darker pigment removal. So again around that hand area I've got darker pigments that are removing so again suggesting lots of over paint on this portrait. So again that crackle area is just coming through now and that's the painting showing its age and even before I started cleaning on that glove you can see the over paint there and that's the darker pattern there on the top. So here you can see there again cracks that have been over painted when this painting was relined or if it's been cleaned since the relining process they've been added on top. So they'll just remove straight away and you can see that the swab now instead of having the yellow tone from the varnish before it's picking up that brown pigment now and discolouring slightly. So when a painting may well have been cleaned in the past there'll be elements that the restorer has decided to push back. If the client wants a full restoration and no sign of age, which many do, especially dealers don't like to see cracks and crackle or anything that could be knocked by a buying customer, they'll ask the restorer to replace those and make it look in as good a condition as possible. Which is great for the sale of the painting but then down the line 100 years once that over paint is discoloured it's down to me to remove it and then see what we've got left underneath. That glove's got some nice detail in there, I like those highlights on the hand so you can almost see what kind of glove that it was. Right so I'm literally 20 minutes into this painting and already I can see that it's been it's massively over-touched in parts. The date on the back says 1984 and gives a rough value so it's been relined so it's either been cleaned around that time maybe because the over paint's removed quite easily, it's quite sticky. Perhaps it was relined in the past maybe 50 years ago, 100 years ago and then maybe it's been cleaned more recently and then that retouching has been added on to it since. So on his cravat area, a little bit sticky on the black area, especially around his glove you can see there that on the glove part where those ridges are and those creases are we could see the retouching on there that had darkened and that's coming off quite easily but I think this painting has probably been restored to a high standard at some point but there's going to be extensive retouching that's going to remove on there so it's very sticky you'll see my cotton swab is grabbing on there as well as I'm working so it's just going to be one of those I've got a very weak solution and it's still lifting that varnish and it's still lifting the historical over paint so it's going to be a tentative one but I do envisage that we're going to get to a very old portrait underneath and a very old portrait that has had quite a lot of work done to it so buckle up people I think we're in for a bit of a ride with this one okay let's carry on so here's the detail of the glove after cleaning you can see all those cracks that have revealed now with the over paint removed and then this area here this black area so a lot of the time when I'm cleaning is done by visual I'm looking to see what's happening with my swab but the bit that I can't really show you on camera is the way the paint I did sorry the way the varnish grabs the swab so at some point you know that you've cleaned the varnish off because the swab moves freely so imagine I don't know like an ice skater on ice and it's just gliding across the paint surface but then sometimes like here you'll see that the cotton has been grabbed by the varnish and the over paint and then your swab really sticks and drags and it's like walking through a muddy field so there's lots of this is to do with touch and feel as well as the visual side of things so what I'll do is I'll soften an area that will grab and then I'll take my swab over an area that should have been cleaned and I'll be able to tell the difference and I'll know right that area is fully cleaned now especially on dark pigments where you can't see the colour difference as well as on white so I'll be able to move that freely and you'll see that it's moving freely but then when I come back to an area that's thick like there at the top you can see little particles there and it just grabs so that area just grabs the the cotton swab and it's really thick so that'll need more solvents just to soften that varnish and unfortunately the over paint as well so it does get quite sticky and it does get quite messy especially when there's an excess amount of over paint on there and these are the little areas why it's been over painted it might be a little scratch it might be a little bit of a dent this bit looks like it's got filler I'm beginning to think this portrait may well have been rolled at some points I've got lots of horizontal cracking along there normally the kind of cracks you get are from an impact but this is quite widespread so I do think it may well have been taken off its stretcher and rolled at some point for whatever reason to transport it or to send it somewhere else or even to store it but it has got an awful lot of these surface cracks that are raised as well so during the the lining process this may well have also been kind of amplified especially if they were kind of dragging across the surface with an iron so here you can see the the dark ground coming through so if this painting has dried out over time those small cracks do form so that this side is the area that's been retouched that I haven't cleaned yet and you can see it's solid but as soon as I've cleaned that varnish off you can see the colour tone change and then you can see where the painting has dried and that crackler has formed they've done this across the whole painting so I imagine large swathes of this painting will have been retouched to push back the the age and make it look fresher than it was so yeah at this stage I normally get in touch with the clients and have a bit of a discussion with them so just so they know when they're aware of what's going to happen so as I'm removing it we're going to get a very older looking portrait and I said that about three or four times now but I'm going to get in touch with the client now and just kind of describe as best I can show some photographs of where we're up to with this portrait and then they're aware of how much work is going to be involved in this because I've got a feeling now that the face that hand for sure I think a lot of this is going to just waltz off when we start cleaning it and then we're going to be in a position where we're going to start putting things back again so I'm just going to make them aware of how much work's involved and we're going to have a bit of a discussion about that and then we'll get back on him and see where we go from there so a bit of a short one today it's been a very few busy few weeks in the studio but um hope you've enjoyed that little bit of a glimpse into what we're going to be doing this portrait there'll be more cleaning next week um please like and subscribe the video if you haven't already just hit it down like done um check out my patreon page the more patreons I get the more I can do this the more often I can post um it'd be great to see you over there I can answer some questions for you um and yeah it looks like we're in for another extensive re-restoration with this one so um take care guys I'll be in touch thanks for watching okay cheers bye