Start to finish Restoration of this beautiful oil painting

Sometimes a painting can be deceptive. Limited on size, this painting, If, by George Morland opens up quite the story. Many artists aspire to live a certain extravagant lifestyle, if you think about Caravaggio, Picasso or Dali. Well it seems that George Morland, born in the 18th century, outstripped them all for his love of life and his prodigious talent His early talent was carefully cultivated by his father with a view to profit from it, shutting up young George in a garret to make drawings from pictures and casts for which he would make the sale and keep the money. George on the other hand is said to have soon found a way to make money for himself by hiding some of his drawings and lowering them at nightfall out of his window to young accomplices with whom he used to spend the proceeds in frolic and self-indulgence. So as you can see this painting has got some history attached to it. It's extremely dirty. It's got a very discoloured varnish on there. There is a lot of craquelure whether that's in the varnish or the paint layer. I'm suspecting the paint layer. It looks quite thick in parts but overall there is lots of detail that you can see through that varnish as well so that's encouraging. On the back this panel has the chamfered edges which probably puts it in around 18th century but it has been prepared with canvas on the back and this is a strip that's been torn off it so unless there was a crack or it was weakened and this was applied to the back to strengthen it I'm not entirely sure but I'm going to be leaving that in place on this painting. I don't see the point of putting it under undue stress to remove that and see what's underneath but the first thing I will do is apply some UV light and see if there's any historical retouching. So a painting this age will no doubt have work being done and you can see there on his coat and jacket it looks a bit darker straight away. Some dark areas in the trees which means fresh paint. I'm not sure what all those little black marks are there if that's an old varnish that's under this varnish layer but the sky looks pretty intact with minimal if any retouching. There is some on the cow there at the bottom and on his shoulder you can see that brown patch there and the jacket and back of the horse as well looks like it's had some work done in the past so that's something to be aware of when we start the clean. So my first port of call will be to see if there is any surface dirt on the painting and then I will look to see what will remove the varnish layer as well. So the first is an aqueous solution this will tell me if there's any nicotine staining or smoke or dirt on there. So this is my first test so I'm going to do this in the rebate area which is like the top five mil that's hidden by the frame and I'm just going to see if anything comes off with this solution. I'm not too hopeful though you can tell straight away that there is very little if anything at all on that surface so it may well have been wiped down fairly recently perhaps before it was put into auction it could have been cleaned off a little bit on the top. And then the next one is a solvent solution and this will determine if the varnish can be removed so what I'm hoping to see is there you go is a yellowed discoloration of that swab which means the solvent is melting the varnish layer and removing it. So you can see that amber colour there coming off and you'll see the blue tones or the lighter blue tones of the sky start coming through. I'm also interested to see if that crackler is holding dirt or if it is a crack in the painting as well so at the moment it seems to be holding dirt which is encouraging as well. So with my tests complete and I know which mixture I'm going to be working with I'm going to start the clean process here and I'm going to show you as much as possible in real time as I can. This seems like a good idea it's only a small painting so hopefully you'll be able to just see or get an idea of what's involved when you actually start cleaning a painting. So I've got my cotton wool and I'm going to separate this up now into a number of swabs ready to go so I usually split it in half then pull off some pieces as you can see about two inches by an inch. I don't have to be dead precise because the the craft or the skill is in the roll so I get my swab stick which is a modified paintbrush which I've had for many years and then I roll the swab. So some days you have a good swab day some days not so good that's pretty good quite happy with that and then into the solution and then I kind of squeeze it on the side so I don't have an excess of solution on that swab and I'm going to start in that top corner there as well so you can see straight away it's biting through that discoloured varnish and beginning to remove it. If it removes too easily I may well dilute the solution a little bit if I'm confident that it's just removing the varnish and nothing else I'll continue. This seems to be just removing the varnish it's a consistent colour and there's no pigment tone coming off even when you're close to the top of those trees as well so I'm confident that this solution is the correct one but I'm just going to check what's happening on the surface so I'm just going to use this magnifying loop and you can see there that we've removed that discoloured varnish and we can see the crackler of the paint surface underneath so with that in mind I can then continue across the rest of the painting. So the blue tones and the white tones are the strongest compared to your browns and your earth pigments so I'm going to clean the sky first and this will give me the confidence and the knowledge required for the rest of the painting so you get a feel for how the varnish is melting how much pull there is on your swab and you know that you're just removing the varnish and not taking anything else off that it's like a brown umber or a raw umber colour but that crackler is so it's so heavy so I'm imagining the paint layer underneath there is quite thick but the problem with that is it does grab and hold varnish layers when you're cleaning so this painting will have been cleaned in the past it's probably the best part of maybe 250 years old or 230 years old maybe George Maldon was active around 1784 or 1785 so I'm just going to have another check here just make sure I'm happy with what's happening there does seem to be a little bits of a darker varnish still present you can see here now whether I need to increase the strength of my solution or not but I think in the first instance I'm just going to concentrate on this kind of raw umber varnish layer and then perhaps we can tackle whatever's left behind it might be a more stronger dammar varnish that someone's cleaned but not fully in the past so we will come to that as we come to it I'm just going to carry on cleaning this so we're kind of thinking this might be an English pastoral scene um that building in the background I don't know it looks a little bit continental to me I'm not sure it looks like it might have an arch and a bell in there in the distance it doesn't particularly look like a stately home or anything too traditionally English so that's what's throwing me at the moment in terms of where this painting could be from but we'll delve into that a little bit later a little bit further down the line so after Moreland fell out with his father he struck out on his own and he went to work with an art dealer but again he just became a slave to this dealer who would sell all his works and just trickle the money to him and he commenced his life which I think as John Hassel his biographer said in its combination of hard work and hard drinking is almost without parallel so he has a reputation you know he's quite prodigious he's producing a lot of paintings he is making money people are making money off the back of him and anything that he has he is spending on drink and uh an indulgent lifestyle it seems his companions were osslers not sure what that is pot boys again not sure what that is horse jockeys moneylenders pawnbrokers punks and pugilists so he is mixing with a certain crowd and in this company the handsome young artist swaggers about dressed in a green coat with large yellow buttons leather breeches and high-top boots so he obviously quite fancies himself he's making good money he's swaggering around and enjoying himself spending all his money on his friends I imagine and drinking so probably in today's equivalent he'd have been driving around in a Lamborghini being a bit of a influencer on Instagram but back in the day there he was just spending it in inns and taverns so he became a bit of a slave to this dealer and then he eventually made a successful effort to free himself and he escaped to Margate where he painted miniatures for a while and then from there he paid a short visit to France where his fame had preceded him and he had no lack of commission so he was on the continent so perhaps if this is a moorland this could be something from the continent that he's done and brought back with him again not quite sure but I'm loving the sky in this the colours the blue azure at the background there of those hills and then that cobalt blue at the top left corner yeah so who whoever the artist is I'm hoping it is moorland he certainly knew what he was doing and even on such a small painting this being about 20 centimetres square there's plenty of detail in there and there's plenty going on so at this stage here if you look at the swabs that are collecting on the right hand side now you can see that they're all of a consistent colour this is the colour of the discoloured varnish and there's nothing that has removed from that paint surface in terms of pigment or any historical retouchings so that's good to see I do think this painting is fairly original as as we saw in the um uv light though it looks like the gentleman on the horse's jacket has been overpainted as well as the back of the horse and then in the shoulder of that cow as well there's been some work so as I come down into the painting now I'm going to just tread carefully around those areas and I'm going to be checking my swab as well because sometimes historical retouchings don't show up in the uv light so you just have to be careful and vigilant as you're cleaning so I'm moving over to a smaller swab and I'm going to have a look now and see what starts happening over here so very tentative that looks like a slightly warmer colour straight away so that might be some of the retouching coming off his jacket let's keep moving it's quite sticky it is quite thick here and again I'm expecting around that cow's shoulder some retouching to remove as well as we go along this fountain will be fairly solid it'll have white in there flake white and it looks like it's got a bit of blue and some greys as well so that'll be quite a strong area to clean I'll also be careful around those foliage as well so pigments like sap green again quite soft pigments quite easily removed if you're not careful yeah it's quite thick the varnish in this section you can see my swab trails over the fountain but I like this composition it's deceptively simple but there is actually quite a lot going on with these two animals and the figure and the fountain there's a bit of movement there and then the distance and the building and there's that little person walking down the lane as well so these genre paintings would have been popular at the time and you can just see there again that jacket if you look at the gentleman's shoulder you can see the lightness of that historical retouching and then the strength of his jacket underneath so I think that's been added at some point afterwards maybe someone wanted the figure to stand out a little bit more right I'm going to have a look at this cow now again I'm just being very general in my approach here seeing if I can just remove the varnish in what reveals that figure is very thinly painted that's just edging off into the distance and this bottom area of the composition is pretty much all browns so again there you can see there just off that cow that the tones darken quite a bit so there is retouching coming off that animal now so I'm going to stop there and just assess so that's the retouching that I'm talking about and I'm aware of so again I'll probably just weaken my solution over there and then just make sure that what is cleaning is the retouching and nothing else so the reason you can be confident that that's what's removing is your solution stays the same across the whole painting so if I clean the back of the cow nothing removes it just has the same kind of umber colour as the varnish from the sky but that same solution removing pigment from the front end of the cow again just suggests that that is fresher pigment or newer retouching so that's how you can be confident that you're removing something that's unoriginal and of course the uv light helps you in that as well when you do your initial assessment but those trees are nicely tackled in the background the foliage the way the leaves have done I really like the way they've been tackled and there's some nice highlights coming through there as well so that's a real nice section of painting too I still think there's more of that jacket to come off that still doesn't look quite original so I'll be assessing that as we go along so with the majority of that varnish removed now I'm just going to have a look at the sky and see what I can do with those small remnants there now I'm not sure if it's dirt it can be dirt so sometimes varnish is applied in layers that trap dirt in so this is my kind of if you like dirty smoky grimy cleaning solution I'm just going to see if all them little small pepper marks are dirt or if it's something else so straight away I can tell with see that's just took a little bit more of that retouching off his jacket there that line but this is not it's not touching that so it can't be dirt it must be a old and discolored varnish that's settled in some of that craquelure so let's have a closer look and you can see here now we've got the thick craquelure which is dark almost black and then we've got some fainter lines like this little section here so I think this is a very very old varnish that has been partially cleaned but it has gathered in some of those paint fissures and areas of craquelure so you can see here I'm just checking that that is on the paint surface with the scalpel and you can see that it is it's just sat on top of there so I'm going to try some different cleaning solutions now so this is a conservation soap with a little bit of solvent in and I'm going to see if this will with a little bit of abrasion tackle that and remove it again it doesn't seem to be having an awful lot this is a different solvent solution again doesn't seem to be budging things too much and then my third try is again is a different solvent and that seems to be lifting it a little bit and pushing it a little bit further into the background so I'm going to continue with that I don't think I'm going to be able to remove all of it but what I might be able to do is reduce that visible so you can see there it's kind of pushed it back a lot without putting that paint surface under too much stress so I will continue with that and then I'm just applying a neutral solvent now just to stop any cleaning processes that I have been working on and this will just stop any reactions that are happening on that painting but it also gives you an idea of what it will look like when it's varnished so I still think there's a historical retouching that's shiny on the cow and a little bit on the gentleman sky looks good it's quite matte now that means all the varnish is removed and some of those pepper pot old varnish marks have been pushed back but there's still areas of his jacket and the shoulder of that cow that I'd like to address further but he's looking a lot brighter and a lot cleaner let me show you a little bit more about George so here we have a portrait of George Morland painted by his father you can see him there in the right hand side looking fairly dapper he looks like he's still under tutelage there so maybe not too wild and here's a selection of his paintings that are in public collections in the UK now there's a few similarities in composition I'd like to draw your attention to so in our little portrait we've got this all the actions in the right hand side so from the top right corner to the left like a diagonal line and that's where all the action is much like this painting here so this draws your eye into that bottom corner so a little bit of something that's kind of similar to a few of his works and then the other thing that I've been looking at I did a google search and I got a lot of Dutch paintings that came up these pastoral scenes with cattle and horses and sheep this one was quite interesting had a similar fountain to the one in our painting so we've got the cattle coming up to draw some water so I had a bit of a google found some pictures of 18th century cattle fountains and water fountains I don't know an awful lot about this but this one again looks quite similar to the fountain that's in our picture so I'm back to just looking at that overpaint on the jacket and it looks like someone at some point repainted that jacket over the top of an original black jacket maybe they did this just to lift that character a little bit out of the depths of the painting and that shadow I've also been working on those kind of pepper pot um old dammar varnish markings but I don't want to over clean and that crackler to stand out any further so I think if I was to aggressively clean this painting more I run the risk of taking off all those peaks of that crackler so I'm going to stop at that point and then I can touch in those marks that are a little bit more pronounced so I'm going to add my barrier varnish now to this painting this is a hydrocarbon varnish it's got really good light fast properties and I'm just going to do a barrier varnish now I'm happy with where the painting's at I feel like this is the um the ground zero should we say where it's back to as much original as possible with any historical retouchings taken off and that the dirty varnish removed and as I say I don't want to clean any further and run the risk of damaging that paint surface so a lot of those tiny little uh marks will stay and you know it's just the painting showing its age so the frame that came with this painting is a reproduction it's probably early 20th century to mid it's quite nice it's a swept frame it's got these decorative corners the finish is a little bit dull so I've chatted with the client and we're just going to give it a little bit of a lift with some gilt cream so this is bronzing powders mixed with a wax and it'll just brush over like a dry brush so I don't put a lot on my brush I rub some off and then just kind of gently highlight all those nice decorative areas and it'll just give the frame an overall lift and brighten it up a little bit so that's all I'm going to do with the frame there's no losses there's no chips or damage so that's just to freshen that up a little bit before the picture goes back in and then I'm going to do some retouching the barrier varnish that I applied has dried and I'm going to use my pigment chips now to retouch in those areas of losses and push back a little bit of that crackler in the sky so these are all raw pigments they're all held in a conservation resin and it has a certain solvent that softens that resin and gives me enough time to mix the colours before it dries and now it dries really quickly probably touch dry within I don't know 30 seconds to a minute and then in four or five minutes it's pretty much completely dry and then it cures completely so you have to work quick with these pigments I have already done a little bit of mixing at the top just to get some colour tones ready to go that I can dip into and then I'm just going to mix and adjust and then I'll offer it up to the painting to see how close we are if we are just slightly out I can always just readjust that and add a little bit more tone to it sometimes you mix a colour and you get it right first time sometimes there's a little bit of adjustment and then again when it dries it changes a little bit as well so you have to do this a lot by feel I'm just all I'm doing is the tiniest little pinprick of pigment just to push those cracks back I just don't want them to detract from the painting so a lot of times I get asked about retouching everything and the answer is usually no this is the painting showing its age if I feel that it's detracting and spoiling your enjoyment of the picture then I will touch in the worst of them you know like these big thick black ones your eye kind of gets drawn to them so by retouching in I'm just balancing those out so that when you look at the painting from viewing distance you can enjoy it for what it is rather than focusing on all that craquelure so again lots and lots of tiny little dots and lines just to push the majority of that back and you can start to appreciate the tones in that painting now the warmness of that sky and again with this area here just pushing the worst and the thickest of just to get a more balanced approach and then I'm going to also put back in some of that historical retouching on the cow so just matching some of those tones there and just bringing those in not doing an awful lot on there really just to give it a more solid appearance and the same with his jacket so I believe his jacket was originally black he certainly looks a lot smarter it looks more well to do if he's taking that cow to market on his horse he's put his best jacket on I'm not sure I think those brown tones are the collar of the jacket so I think this is more original than the over paint that was on there previously I think somebody might have just got a bit carried away or acted under the owner's uh discretion to add that in so for all intents and purposes now I'm going to leave that and then I'm going to apply a top coat of varnish so I'm just going to pack these away and my top coat of varnish is a different varnish it's got a different makeup and it's got a little bit more of a gloss finish than the barrier varnish so this will add a lot of richness to the painting and allow those colours to really shine through it's also important that the varnish you use does not interfere with the retouching so the retouching pigments abound in one resin and this varnish is made up of another so if there were similar solvencies you run the risk of brushing all your restoration away right while that's drying I'm going to get the frame ready to fit it up these are my fixtures and fixing boxes they contain pins my bradels some labels lots of different screws hangers offsets and more offsets in here it does look kind of messy but there is some sort of system there but before I attach any of those I want to put a protective insulation foam tape on the inside when I'm using panels there's a bit less give in a panel as opposed to a canvas so when I frame up or fit up a panel I like to use this and it's it's a self-adhesive foam kind of conservation tape it's probably about a millimeter or thick maybe a little bit more and you lay this into the rebate of the frame and it just gives the board a little bit of cushioning when you fasten it in so while I'm doing that I will tell you a little bit more about George Morland so he was very successful he managed to leave his task master the dealer and escaped to France for a while where he did some commissions he was really popular at his time so he might have easily lived for a week on the earnings of a day's work he was besieged by dealers who came to him with a purse in one hand and a bottle in the other. Morland was just as scrupulous in his dealings and if a pitcher started under contract with one dealer it could easily be sold to another if he had money and possibly another bottle in his hand in this way quite a few of his pitchers went on to the market started by Morland and finished by another hand. John Hassel, Morland's biographer, said he once saw 12 copies from a small picture of Morland's in a dealer's shop with the original in the centre so there was quite a brisk trade in creating these copies as well. He did marry I can't imagine how well that went but they were married for a while and he did separate at some point but his extravagant hard-drinking hard-working lifestyle saw him in debt all the time he had a long list of creditors chasing him around London and as time went on his debts increased and his creditors became more pressing so he lived a bit of a hunted life only able to escape from the bailiffs by his knowledge of London and the assistance of friends and dealers he had many which he had rooms prepared with materials and easels for him to paint in when he was on the run and I think at once he was arrested because they thought he was forging bank notes as well so they kind of cornered him arrested him and then they found out that he wasn't actually forging bank notes so they gave him some money as compensation so a very I don't know what the word is exciting or extravagant or just a little bit lawless he had this great talent of painting and he just used it to make fast money and enjoy himself and unfortunately he ended up in debtor's prison he was eventually released but his health was ruined and he'd lost the use of his less his left hand and he couldn't hold his palette but he painted up until the end it seems he was released again from debtor's prison and then he was arrested again for a republican not republican sorry a publican score so that must have been a debt he had and he died in a sponging house in Ayr Street Coldbath Field on the 27th of October 1804. His wife died three days afterwards and both were buried together in the burial ground attached to St James's Chapel in the Hampstead Road and there are some known 4,000 paintings attributed to him and many more copies circulating so there's a good chance that this could be a George Morland there's a good chance it could be after him it could have been started by him and finished by somebody else or it could be a copy we will never know there's no signature on there but it's certainly off the time it's certainly um got the hallmarks in terms of the composition the way he worked and looking at those smaller paintings of his his pot boilers i can imagine he would have knocked two or three of those out just to get some beer money shall we say um so there's no reason why this painting could not be an actual George Morland as well but i mean what a life um i think a lot of artists today would just be happy if they could sell their paintings the only one i can think of similar to this lifestyle is Francis Bacon and i know he used to sell his paintings or take his paintings to the Marlborough Gallery in London and they would kind of give him some money to live on and go and enjoy himself um so yeah he had a kind of similar extravagant lifestyle using painting to fund it um but yeah so anyway we are putting this little picture back together now he is almost finished and i am excited to show you how he looks just a few more finishing touches to the back of the frame now i like to put these cushions on the back just to stop it marking the wall i've left on the original um auction stickers as well customers like to have that provenance attached uh the name on the left hand side are Beddington i think he's just a previous owner i have googled this and nothing comes up and there's my label as well so that's on there and let's go and put it up and see how it looks so as with a lot of these restorations what comes in is a pretty straightforward clean there is always some element of extra work in there or something unanticipated um but look at this now the colours are fabulous that crackler looks commensurate with age there's nothing jarring there um i love i just love the action in here just it's just a gentle picture with a little bit of drama in there his jacket looks a lot better now on him you've got the figure in background walking into the distance and that lovely sunset there over the hills the colours of the sky have come through the frame is brighter now and it is a lovely or shall i say mighty little picture i'm really pleased with it and i hope the client will be too well guys that's all we have time for this week that was the mighty little moorland that i've got in um it was great to hear about his life and um i don't know i don't know whether i'd like to live that life maybe when i was younger man it would be quite attractive but um just sounds really stressful being in debt and all that drinking and running around it just seems a little bit chaotic for me uh maybe i'm just getting old um but yeah it's a lovely little picture it's very cute um not everything that comes into the studio has to be like the threadbare seigneur or shipwrecked a lot of paintings are just in for a clean but there is always some element of um i don't know something to overcome and with this one unfortunately that those little pepper pots of old dammar varnish or whatever it is seem to be in the craquelure they seem to be quite hard so when it's been cleaned in the past that's that stayed there because somebody else had the same issue that i found that it doesn't really want to remove very easily unless you get really aggressive and as soon as you get aggressive you run the risk of damaging the rest of the painting or taking off too much paint from those peaks of that craquelure so i think it's a good result he looks a lot brighter um all the details still there and he was nice to reveal his jacket i think he looks like a much smarter chappy with his black jacket on there as well so i hope you enjoyed that thank you to all my patrons thank you for supporting the channel everybody who's been on there will have seen the threadbare seigneur update we found some more information on him and about the mark on the back of his frame and someone the other day mentioned that it might be something to do with the cardinal's hat or something so i've still got some more to dig out on the threadbare seigneur but there's loads of exclusive stuff over there and tutorials if you haven't been over there and want to support the channel please get over there now and have a look other than that my weather report for today it's getting boring this sunny again bright sunshine it's like summer's here everything's slowing down out there everybody else is slowing down and i'm speeding up because the studio is super busy anyway if you've made it this far thanks for watching hope you enjoyed it drop me a comment send me a message on patreon uh other than that have a lovely weekend and i will catch up with you all very soon all right cheers guys thank you