The Regency Gent - Saving a failed restoration Part 5

Hi everybody, welcome back to the studio. I hope you enjoyed last week's episode, the epic relining of the Regency Gents. It was a bit longer than usual, I hope that went down okay. Welcome to all my new subscribers and my new Patreon members, thanks for supporting the channel and thanks for all your comments as usual, I do read through them. Again, some really interesting comments, especially about the stretcher, that seemed to get a lot of people's imagination going and I do have some extra information about that which I will share during this episode. But today we are going to be carrying on with the Regency Gents, I've got a little bit more cleaning to do just to make sure I've got everything off that I want to get off and then we'll be applying a barrier varnish. As you can see it's grim in Manchester today, the wind's whistling through the studio but I'm sure things will warm up as we get going. So yeah, welcome along and let's get started. So I'd like to think you're all familiar now with how he arrived at the studio. Overpainted, thick paint everywhere all over this canvas and this is where he is now. So as you can see he's been cleaned, had all that overpaint removed. There is still patches of thick paint in the sky area, some on his face that needs addressing. Last episode we relined him, so we attached him to a new piece of canvas. There still might be some wax residue on the painting that we need to remove and there's also a few small areas that I do want to address, especially looking at those highlights in his eyes. I still think they may be a bit of a residue from the original overpainting. So the first thing I'm going to do is now use my solution. So this is a slightly weaker solution to the one that we used to remove the overpaint and just by weakening it and going over the painting I'm just seeing what is left on there now. This will show me how much I've cleaned, how much residue is still on there and as you can see as I'm moving over the painting now there's not an awful lot coming onto that swab. But as it does make the surface a bit more solid you can see which areas I need to tackle. So all those small dots are areas of paint loss. On his cheek there are areas of either overpaint that has not been able to be removed if it's been fused onto the paint surface. So again I'm just going around his hair checking that swab and seeing what's coming off. There are some small areas that are lifting there but when the swab is this colour I do know that the majority of the clean has been done. So again just checking that background area now. We can see that beautiful blue sky coming through. Originally totally overpainted. You can see some areas where it's like a lot lighter in there. I think that's part of the underpaint coming through there that's either been cleaned off by Mr Williamson or it was very thinly applied to begin with. Just in the mid-centre of that image you can see some not small blackish or not black but dark brown areas of congregated paint. That's something that I will be looking to address as well. And on this side you can see some small white dots. This looks like it could be emulsion paint or splashes. Paintings often get splashed when the decorators are in or if they're laying around an artist's studio. So these white spots have appeared after I've removed the overpaint from the painting. So they've been on there some time. With emulsion spots and paint spots you can usually just kind of very gently kind of clip them off or scratch them off with a blunt scalpel. These areas now are the parts that I'd like to kind of address really. So if I continue cleaning with my swab all the way around that I'm going to take off or run the risk of taking off some of the paint surface. Now this paint is so thick that it has actually fused and stuck to the original paint. So just using a very blunt scalpel blade now I'm just going to look at trying to scrape away that paint or gently try and lift it. And again this is one of the reasons why I relined it in the last episode because I wanted to make sure that that paint surface was nice and secure. If it is turning out to be super stubborn then I will leave it and we will retouch over the top. But this sometimes gives a surface discrepancy which can look can be a little bit obvious. So I will try and just take those off as much as possible. Again a very time-consuming process. You want to be careful that you're not actually taking any paint that you don't want to come off. So again it's more a matter of like slowly slowly and just take off the peaks. You can see here this is I've got a lot of that off now and I'm getting down to that paint surface. Looks like there's some kind of stain through the paint there a little bit. But again just very gently taking off sections of that overpaint just to reveal the underneath pigments. And this is further down on the painting now you can still see that it's very thick there and underneath the paint surface is very very thinly applied as well. So again I'm just going to gently take off some of these peaks of the overpaint and just try and match the level with the surface of the paint underneath. It might look quite aggressive this but it is very very gentle and I'm just very aware of the actual areas that I'm tackling. Just by slightly changing the angle of that blade you can just either take off too much or too little. So it's just getting that right it's almost like planing that paint surface down. So after last week's episode I had lots of comments with suggestions for what this impression might read on the stretcher and a number of you came up with London. My friend and client has got a master carpenter friend and he said that stretcher makers used to kind of roughly scribble on the bottom struts where the studio was based. So this could well tie in with that and it could also help me identify the date of the stretcher. It seems that this stretch is made of cherry wood which was used between around 1806 to 1815 and this was due to the Napoleonic Wars. So during the Napoleonic Wars there's lots of trade embargoes placed and important pictures would normally have a mahogany stretcher but as this wasn't being able to be imported and supplies had run low due to the furniture trade they started to look towards more indigenous species and this short grained wood will be a cherry tree wood stretcher which was popular just due to the makeup of it and the way it handled moisture and temperature changes. So this would put it in that period of around 1809-1810 where the family said the painting was commissioned. So thanks everyone for getting in touch with your ideas and maybe this does read London and maybe we just not got the actual studio maker's name on the other stretcher bars but yeah it's definitely interesting and great to place it in our date range. So I'm happy with the actual mechanical removing that I've done now. There are some small areas on there and this is just me adding some white spirits now to remove any wax residue from the relining procedure that we did. Sometimes it can impregnate onto the top of the canvas and this mineral spirits now will just remove any wax residue from the surface and stop that interfering with the barrier varnish layer that we will be applying shortly. I always like doing this because you start again when you apply this white spirit you get a glimpse of how the painting is going to turn out. You get an idea of how it will look with that varnish layer added and you start to see the true colours coming through. You can still see that it's very dry in this portrait so as I'm applying the white spirits it's absorbing very quickly into that paint surface and evaporating quite quickly as well. Sometimes it'll just sit on top of a painting but with this one it does seem to be absorbing that quite a lot so that's something for me to bear in mind when I apply the final coats of varnish. There is some wax residue on that coat area in that bottom left hand corner which I'm going to tackle as well. But as I'm cleaning this, well not cleaning, as I'm applying this you can see through the paint layers and there is some still bits of I think residue or over paint left on this painting so once this white spirit has dried I'm going to just use a conservation cleaning soap and just see if I can remove any final bits of residue. But look at the colours coming through now. The colour of that waistcoat, the bright yellowness of it, the brightness of his cravat, his face and hair, the lips have got a nice kind of tone to them too. Yeah, he's just coming together so much more now and the jacket looks so rich. That deep blue of the jacket just looks fabulous. I'm really pleased with how he's looking and now I'm just going to apply the conservation soap which has been diluted down and I'm just using a piece of cotton wool and just gently going over the surface now not attending to one area too much but I can see that there is still areas that need to remove so again just gently going over the whole top of that painting and lightly removing any little bits of dirt or paint residue or anything that's left on that paint surface will remove with this process. So in that left hand side now you can see those colours are a lot more uniform. We've got that lovely blue coming across the sky behind his head. We've got some highlights in clouds and this section near his shoulder you've got like billowing paleness of clouds coming through. I've still got some of those thick areas of paint that I tried to remove but they may need to be retouched over. So again I'm just going to gently apply some white spirit so this will take off the soap that I've just put on there and this will remove that from the surface and it just allows me to see the painting again how it will be once it's varnished and it just allows me to make decisions on what else needs tackling with that picture. So we're down to the final stages of the clean now and this is where you have to start making judgments on how much more you want to do, how much you're happy with what's left on there, what you're willing to live with and what you're willing to retouch. So he's definitely getting there and I feel like that sky is quite dramatic. We've got a lovely lightness over his left shoulder which has added a little bit more detail to it. I still think that there are sections that have been over cleaned by Mr Williamson and perhaps that was why he over painted so thickly. In this jacket area too I think there's little bits of areas here that have been maybe cleaned a little bit too much in the past. So I'm just gently going around those buttons and again you can still see residue coming off there now. Okay on to his eyes. I think this white dot is Mr Williamson. You've got a little bit in the right hand side of his eyeball that's kind of greyish and then we've got this white bit that just looks too thick and doesn't seem to be any pigment related to the actual painting and I also think it's in the wrong place on his eye. I never really see such a big triangular kind of highlight in a pupil so I think this is overpaint and that is why I've made the decision to remove it. So again rather than scrub away with the solvent that has already not touched this thick paint I'm using the mechanical method just to kind of scrape away that overpaint and get down to the layer underneath. So you can see there that's more or less all gone and the same on his other eye. Again I don't think that was a highlight. It goes outside of his pupil on his iris. It's sort of on the wrong side I think for the painting and again I'm just gently going to remove that and then once I've retouched in the eye you can see it does need retouching anyway in the pupil and the iris. I will put the highlight back in and I'll use other portraits as reference for this so that I get it in the right position. And already he looks much improved for that. Okay so I've done my clean on him now, well the second, well second, third, fourth pass clean on him. I've taken off as much as I want to take off now. There are some very thick areas that you've seen I've had to use like a mechanical method to kind of scrape that away. I'm happy with the background now. I think that's how it's intended. It's very loose, it's very light and of course we don't know how much Mr Williamson may have taken off when he cleaned it all those years ago. Any bits of paint that are left on there, small pieces now I'm talking, they may just be slightly retouched in but as a whole he's looking more and more complete and that is one of the reasons why we re-lined him so I could be a little bit more aggressive with that final pass clean and remove any remaining dirt and overpaint. So he's looking good. Next thing to do is apply a barrier varnish. I'm going to do that now and then once that barrier varnish is dry we'll begin the retouching stage so let's do that. Okay for those of you who've watched some of my earlier episodes this is a varnish that I make up myself. It's a hydrocarbon varnish, it's fully reversible and it's got really good light fast properties. I'm applying this now to protect the painting as it stands so I've cleaned off all the overpaint, I've cleaned off all the dirt. There may still be a few little bits or a few elements on there but I don't want to risk cleaning any further so anything else that I'll be doing to this painting now will be retouching. This varnish protects the paint from anything that I add on so none of the paint that I add will be fusing with the original paint layer which is a problem. All the paint that I add on top of this now will just sit on top of this varnish so a restorer in 100 years, 200 years time, they'll be able to remove my retouchings and they will be able to remove the varnish and get back down to this level and then they can assess the painting and decide what needs doing for the future. So this barrier varnish layer is to protect the original artist's intention and it also allows me a little bit of freedom that I know that I'm not applying anything on top of original paint. So I want to apply this now and then let it dry and then we will start the retouching process. So this varnish does look quite thick here but as I just keep working it up and down I'll be spreading it further and further and just getting a really nice even coat across all of that painting. Again a really pleasurable stage of the painting because again I'm getting to see what it's going to look like finished. I'm getting to see those colours shine through from the varnish and I can start getting an idea of what he will look like once he's complete. So again I really enjoy getting to this point too. Right we're going to let him dry now and while he's drying I'll show you what I've been doing on the signature of the painting. This is what we've got left in the bottom right hand corner. Not an awful lot. I've been staring at this for weeks now and trying to decipher what we've got. So I've put this into Photoshop and I make that first letter to be a J. This looks like an S. This could be an A to an N and then I'm guessing the next one is a T because that looks like a crossbar of a T and then I've got a clearish 8 there which helps a lot. Let me just show you what I've done. So I've inverted it to get it to black and white or desaturated rather and again seeing if anything shows up. The next layer is an inversion of that signature again just trying to see if anything comes clearer from that photograph. I can see the 8 very clearly there. That helps and I think that's a one and I think there is another zero there. This was, I can't remember what this was, but this was again trying to replace a colour so I was highlighting a colour tone from the signature and replacing it and then this was desaturating just to show the red tones only which really does clearly show that first and second letter and then I just kind of dotted in where I see the darker pigments so just dotted in on a separate layer and traced the darker pigments and then I think that's an 1810. I don't think it's an 1819. It could have just been me dotting on the wrong bits and that's with all the layers that's what we've got so I'm looking at a J possibly an S, could be a G, I'm not too sure, an A and an N and is that a T or a H? I'm really a little bit unsure on that so unfortunately with there being so little left that's all I've got. So I went on to a famous Wikipedia website listing 18th century portrait painters and I've just been going through a list, checking dates when the actual artists were alive, checking similarities of work and I've been through a whole host of different artists. Some of them the name looks right like a Sant or a Smith but then you click on the actual paintings and it doesn't actually look very similar to what we've got. This one was quite good, John Smith. I looked at his stuff but he was more of a pastelist and then I found this document online and a lot of the portraits seemed similar to our guy. Look there you've got the yellow waistcoat, you've got another yellow waistcoat there in the blue jacket, some similar kind of poses but again nothing concrete and and then you just end up getting lost and then I spend hours just looking at portraits of people and trying to tie something together. So this is where we're at. I've got ideas of style, who he looks like, like last week we looked at Hopner. I've got the remnants of a signature but other than that I've got nothing concrete as to who the original artist is. From the family's story I think we're pretty certain that this is Patrick Sampson Lloyd so I'm happy for that. I just wish I could have found more on that signature. So if any of you guys out there want to take a still from the footage and see if you can find something out of the artist who he might be, please feel free to have a look. Like I say there's a there's a wealth of information out there and someone might just get lucky and see something similar or a similar signature but that's as far as I've been able to get with it unfortunately so we will see. Maybe that's not a J, I don't know, it looks like a J, could be a D but anyway that's where we're up to with the signature so yeah please feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts on that or if you've got any ideas I'd be happy to to see what you've got to say. So now we're back onto retouching all these little paint losses now. I'm just colour matching and pushing back. I am doing the smallest of small brush strokes, just a dot in there. I'm matching the pigments around just to push this all back now. So my plan is that I can see what's original paint, I can see what's been over cleaned and I'm just going to try and make a way to make those mesh together now so that when you are this close, I mean this is quite close to view the portrait, I want it to look whole and complete but I'm not applying massive strokes like Mr Williamson did, I'm just applying very very small pigment matched pinpoints of paint now just to push those dark areas back. I'll just be doing this small section by small section. What I tend to do is mix a colour tone that I can see in one area then once that's mixed I'll put that in the same area, I'll look for different points where that colour will go and then I'll go back and adjust and take another colour tone and attach that to the next area here so that same tone will do all these dots here and you can see that that's that area pushed back then and then this is discolouration or over paint that was stubborn and fused so I'll take that tone across there now to break up, they look like two vertical stripes so I'll be looking at breaking those up again just very very slowly bit by bit pulling away and assessing making sure that I'm able to blend with these little dots and make that whole area solid again. So my client's been back in touch with the dealer again and with his notes and recollections he sent me an email with a little bit more of the story of the portrait of what he can remember and the family's version of events so according to these notes from all those years ago as we know this was Patrick Samson Lloyd who was 39 to 40 years old at the time this portrait was painted. The family also said that underneath the overpainting was a very good picture of their ancestor which we've now found. The family could remember the artist's name but knew he was renowned for having painted the Prince Regent and Lord Nelson both of which the artist John Hopner R.A. did a number of times being the rival of the artist Sir Thomas Lawrence. The family's story was that the artist was unwell and had to stop painting the portrait in 1808 but feeling better proceeded again finally finishing it in January 1809. It was one of the last he completed according to the family story. This would fit with the history of the artist John Hopner as he had been diagnosed with severe liver disease some years before and as most people only drank huge quantities of beer wines and spirits which were much higher in alcohol content than would be allowed today and water was polluted and wasn't safe to drink unless boiled. Beer was consumed around the clock even at breakfast with tea so painful gout, hepatitis and sclerosis were common. Kidney and liver diseases were also prevalent so the liver failure would eventually lead to the death of aged 51 on the 23rd of January 1810. Apparently the portrait hung in the Lloyd's Bank boardroom in London for many years and well after the death of Patrick aged 71 whereupon it was finally presented to his son. He was living with his wife and Patrick's grandchildren at their family home Arley Hall and that coincides with the label on the back which we've already seen. The portrait hung on the staircase in pride of place with other members of the family for many years but gradually it began to darken and became quite opaque according to the dealer's notes. By the 1870s the picture was moved to a bedroom then another and then another finally ending up in a rarely used guest bedroom looking dirty and covered in grime having hung above a drafty fireplace. By the mid 1890s the families decided to ask a friend of theirs a Mr John Williamson a teacher and local amateur artist to try to clean off the darkened varnish and a creamy bloom that had developed while relegated to a damp cold bedroom. He took a look at the picture and declared that he daren't do that as he made damage to the fine portrait. The family wanted to send it to London to have it professionally cleaned but feared the expense for a family picture not of any worth so instead Williamson apparently suggested that as a temporary solution he would be willing to over paint and highlight the portrait where it needed it to refresh and invigorate it. Now whether he had a go at cleaning it first and then suggested this we will never know. It seems he returned the following month and the family was mortified and Mr Williamson was paid his two guineas, shone the door and was never invited back again. At first the mistress of the house wanted the gardener to burn it on the rubbish pile but was eventually persuaded by her son to leave it and have it properly cleaned at some time in the future. She reluctantly agreed but it was banished to an unused attic and stayed there from Queen Victoria's death, the Edwardian era, through World War One, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression in the 30s until the Second World War. Then the empty rooms in the house were used for the housing American pilots from a nearby airbase and the pictures, unwanted and broken furniture was all removed to the unused stables and piled up and covered with sacking and left for a further 40 years. So that was when the dealer in the early 90s was called to the house as it was going to be renovated and the stables turned into offices and an estate shop so he was asked if he wanted to purchase any of the furniture and unwanted paintings. The Regency gent was amongst those and nearly ended up on the bonfire for anything not sold. Luckily he was bought and saved as it was while everything else was restored and gradually sold off. This was left alone and unloved according to the dealer and languished in his antique shop in the bargain basement section until he eventually sold his shop 10 years ago when he retired. Eventually he put it up for sale a few months back and is delighted that it has now been revealed to be probably quite an important picture. So basically it seems maybe that's the full story of where it's been and how it came about, almost ending up on a bonfire twice. So we don't know who painted this portrait. We have a story attached to its history of the last 127 years and we are getting to the point now where he's almost going to be finished and ready to be displayed again and put in Pride of I'm really pleased that Patrick is being revealed now. We're going to continue with this retouching now and work on his eyes, work on the eyebrows, get those pupils back in and just keep bringing him close to as he would have been when he was first painted. Right guys, we're going to have to leave that there for today. As you can see we've started retouching now and it's just loads of tiny tiny little pigment match dots there just to kind of push those areas of damage. I don't want to put sways and sways of paint on there, it's just really trying to make the areas of the face solid again. So we're just trying to put little dots in there and yeah tidy them up. So thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed it. I am going to look forward to your comments so if anyone wants to take the mantle up and have a look at see if you can find some research or if you want to have a bit of a signature and see if you can find anything. I feel like I'm at a little bit of a dead end there but anyway please do get in touch. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe and check out my Patreon page if you want to ask me some questions. Other than that I will see you very soon, hope you have a good week and catch up soon. All right, cheers guys, thanks for watching, bye.