Restoring a 19th Century Portrait Using a New Repair Technique

Some paintings spend their lives hanging proudly on walls, admired every single day, and others simply wait. This portrait has spent much of its life hidden away in storage, unseen and largely forgotten. When it finally emerged at auction it found a new owner who wanted to give it another chance. But even then its journey wasn't over. For the past year it stood patiently here in my studio, waiting for its turn. Time hasn't been particularly kind to this painting. It's suffered a huge impact, it's got a gaping tear through the centre. The edges have become weak and worn after nearly two centuries under tension, and years of dirt and discoloured varnish have slowly concealed the painting belief. But every painting deserves its moment, and today that wait finally comes to an end when we see if we can bring this painting back to the way it was always meant to be seen. So I have had this painting a while, my apologies to my client, it's such a good painting and it deserves a full deep dive which is what this is going to be. So for the next few weeks I'm going to be exploring this painting, seeing if I can restore it to its former glory, unearth some of its history, who the sitter is and who the artist may be, and hopefully we'll discover some new techniques and a little bit more about the painting as we go. Before we undertake anything though it's important that we assess exactly what we're dealing with. So what we've got is maybe an early to mid 19th century portrait. It's painted by an artist who obviously knew what they were doing, but as you can see there are issues. We've got a very severe crackler across his face. We've got this huge impact in his chest. We can see crackler across the whole of the painting as well, so they're the main issues that we need to look at. But the other thing is that we want to keep it as original as possible. I've spoken with the client, those stamps and date marks on the back are quite important. We don't want to line the whole painting, we just want to assess or address rather these issues that it's got. The tacking edge is intact, it's not deteriorated too much, but those tacks look like they may have deteriorated a little bit. Parts of the linen are worn and dirty from years of just sitting in storage. They may be damp there as well. This is what we want to save. We've got these stamp marks across the back. Now these may be collection marks, someone suggested they may be custom marks, but we'd like to keep this as much as possible. It will help with the provenance of the painting, and it might help with the history of who the sitter is and where this painting has been. The other thing I need to assess is whether there's been any past restoration attempts. There's quite a lot of marks on this canvas, so my UV light shows any retouchings, and there are a few little dots here and there that are fluorescing darker. That crackler remains unrestored, which is unusual. And then in the background, we've got a few areas where there might be little touches here and there. I can see a green fluorescent varnish on there as well, but it's so very dirty. There's like a dirt layer across the whole picture. We've got splashes of paint on there and other surface marks. You can see some red over the book. Little splashes of, I'm not sure what kind of paint that is, but I'll have to do some tests on there as well. Unfortunately, at this first initial assessment, we can't find any signature, though my client has done some research and does have some ideas. But what we're going to do, we need to maintain those marks on the back, and we need to stabilise the painting in front of us. But before we fully commit to this restoration, we want to see if it will clean. Now, you can see straight away that it's very discoloured. It's yellowed, and that could suggest two things. It can suggest tobacco staining or smoke damage, which always leaves a yellow effect to a painting, or it could be a discoloured varnish. So I'm going to use two different solutions, and the first solution is going to test for nicotine or tobacco staining and smoke damage. So this is an aqueous solution, and you can see straight away that it is beginning to lift. There's yellow deposits on that swab. Not as strong as I thought it might come off, but still it is making a difference. So I'm just going to increase the strength of that mixture and go again. But again, not an awful lot's removing. It is cleaning, so that suggests now that there could be multiple layers on this painting. So I've increased the solution strength again, and I'm just going to try it in another area. Now I'm trying it on this cravat because I want to test on the stronger pigments, which are the white pigment tones. They're the ones that are the most stable. And you can see here the stronger solution, although it's reacted quicker, it is making more of a difference there in that first instance, but it's still not making as much change as I thought. So that suggests different layers. Now this is the solvent clean. So that's cutting through the varnish there, you can see. So we've got a layer of smoke and dirt. This swab's cleaning the varnish layer. That's removing a discoloured yellowed varnish. And when I've cleaned, you can still see there's a little bit more yellowed underneath there as well. So that could suggest that there's another layer as well. So underneath that varnish layer could be another dirt layer. So I'm going to use my aqueous solution again and see if this takes off anything else. Right guys, I have done those test cleans now. So I think there's a layer of dirt on there and then a varnish layer and then another layer of dirt underneath that and possibly another varnish layer. So four layers in total. My concern with this piece is the tear. And I've got those stamps on the back. I think those stamps are customs marks or collections marks. Now I can photograph them, line the painting and put them on the back of the canvas. Or I can thread repair the damage and bridge it and do a lightweight patch. And then that would preserve those marks on the back. The tacking edges are a little bit loose and a little bit worn. So they may need to be strip lined. Or I just line the whole canvas because there's quite a lot of crackler along there as well. So there's lots of different options with this painting. I'm not entirely sure which way to go just as yet. So what I might do is just reinforce that tear and then just clean it a little bit and spend a little bit more time deciding what the best path is. It's always difficult when you're planning out a strategy for a painting. There's lots of different things to bear in mind. To make that easier I'm just going to concentrate on the thing that's glaringly obvious, which is that tear. So as I move the painting around it's unstable. So I need to just secure that in place so that I can do other work on the picture. And to do that I'm just going to use some little joining tapes. It's a conservation tape. I'm going to put some little pieces in on the front of the painting just to hold that in place. It's a lower tack adhesive. It's not going to damage the paint surfaces anyway. So I can just create some small strips almost like tape sutures and hold that in place from the front. And then once I've got that secured I can start thinking about what we're going to do with this painting. Now I've already mentioned that I've spoken with the client. I think we want to keep things as original as possible. We do want to keep those stamps on the back. So I'm thinking that we won't reline this picture. We'll address that tear first and foremost. And we also need to look at those tacking edges because there's just so much... And then there's things like this. How has that even got in there? I don't even know how that... Unless it's just fallen in and been pushed in. But that's a first as well. I've never seen anything pushed into the front of the painting. So with the front secured I'm just going to put some... It's like a very fine tissue tape. It's for bookbinding. It's like a Japanese adhesive tissue. You can see how thin it is. But I'm just going to secure that from the back as well just to make sure that it doesn't move while I'm doing some more structural work to the side of the painting and those tacking edges. So again all fully reversible and it's not going to cause any damage to the back of that painting. So let's get it off the stretcher. Let's remove these tacks. Now these are not my favourite types of tack to remove. They've got a very flat head. They've rusted. They've started to deteriorate. And you're just happy when you get one out whole. What tends to happen is the heads bend and snap and you're just left with a stump. So I'm trying to avoid that by just digging in as well a little bit but I need to move this so it's vertical. And it'll give me a little bit more purchase from the top of the painting and I can apply a little bit more pressure. So in order to save this tacking edge this is what I need to do and it's just going to be a bit of a slow process to try and safely remove those tacks. Some remove easier than others and some are just fused in there and the tops are just so delicate that getting them out whole is just another matter altogether. But whoever the artist was he was a fabulous painter. There's so much detail in his face and then we've got this book that he's holding as well. I think there might be a few clues in there as to either who the sitter is or who the artist may be as well. So what fascinated me about these tacks is they all seem slightly different. They're all a little bit of a different thickness or length and I don't know an awful lot about tack production so I don't know whether these would have been cast or moulded but if anybody out there knows how they would have made these tacks in the past please let me know. So with all these removed now I can take the stretcher completely off the painting and we can assess how the rest of the picture looks. So I'm going to put this to one side and we'll come back to this later on and we can see what we've got behind the stretcher bar marks. We've got those spruce needles or Christmas tree needles in there. We've got a lot of dust and dirt and accumulation. So this has just been sat somewhere and the air around it has been blowing up dust and it's all been settling behind this painting. The interesting thing is the back of the canvas isn't overly dark so I think it has been stored for quite a long time. It's just been allowed to be involved in those elements that damp. I think it's probably fluctuated in temperature and humidity so that's led to that crackler across the whole painting. But it's in pretty good condition. There are areas where there are weaknesses. It's very dry. It's very brittle. So before I do anything else I just want to relax those tacking edges. So I'm just using a little bit of water ever so slightly just to soften up the edges here. So I'm just going to use this sponge. I won't be using it anywhere near as damp as that so I'll be squeezing that out. And it's just to introduce a little bit of moisture and allow those edges to relax. It'll also clean them a little bit as well and remove any bits of trapped dirt and dust in there as well. But the main thing is that I want this to sit nice and flat so that I can get it ready for the strip lining. Where it's folded over at the bottom there are also other pin marks further down. So I'm also wondering if this has been re-stretched at some times onto a slightly smaller stretcher. The sides are the same and the top's the same but the bottom has definitely been reduced at some point and I'm not sure why. So while the edges are still damp I'm just going to gently take these down before I press it. So these are just going to hold the edges flat. I'm going to put a little bit of acrylic over the top and just press this painting for a while before I start the next stage. And the funny thing with this painting it has sat in my studio for about a year and I think that's partly because I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to approach it. Yes I know how to clean it. Yes I could have lined it but I wanted to find a solution to preserve those stamps on the back of the painting. And as life would have it here's a little clue to where this opportunity is going to take me. Okay I've just arrived in central Belfast and the whole place is on lockdown. The buses have all stopped, there's no public transport. It's crazy I've never seen this quiet. Well not that I've ever been here before but just mental. So yeah I'm going to go to City Hall now and then work my way down to the hotel but it is very very eerie. Anyway let's see what happens. The workshop's finished now. I'm just in Belfast waiting for the bus to get me back to the airport. It really was a great two days. So much information, some really great people. Just nice to spend time with some of the stories as well and swap cleaning solutions and different techniques and share stories. So that was great as well. I'm gonna head back to the bus station now and get the flight back to Manchester. So when I got back from Belfast the first thing I did was order lots of new adhesives, new textiles and fabrics, a couple of new tools. But more than anything I just came back feeling really inspired and excited to have another look at this tear. As I mentioned I would normally try and line a tear of this magnitude. What is going in its favour is it's quite a clean tear. Look at that vertical mark down the middle there, that vertical area. The top's jagged and rough. We'll have to match those threads together but that middle section is nice and clean so I can bridge that. I can weld those tears together end to end. But before I can do any of that I need to just remove that holding tape from the front and then I can flip the painting back over and start the process of doing a thread repair on the reverse. So while I was doing the workshop we had a number of different methods for magnification. We had the head magnification with the interchangeable lenses but a number of restorers had these great little USB microscopes. I'd never used one before and I was really impressed with it. It wasn't the most expensive microscope there by any means but I'm going to show you how I was using it on the workshop. So it plugs directly into your phone or tablet or computer and it just gives you that added magnification. Now it took me a while to work out what I was doing with this but once it's set up it really is quite useful. So there you can see I don't know what the magnification level is there. I'll get it so you can see what I'm working on. So when I was on the workshop I was using the magnification alongside the headwear as well. I'm just going to leave this in place to show you what I'm going to try and do. So I've got the magnification on my eyes which are a nightmare to use. I find them really difficult and the idea is that you just gently push and manoeuvre the threads and the linen back together so that they meet as one again. What you'll see here with this canvas is that it's very very brittle and very dry and the one piece of kit that I didn't purchase before I started was a little demister or a way of introducing very very light moisture. But I did manage to add a little bit of moisture mechanically myself but you can see how dry and fragile those threads are. Once I was happy that my tear was lined up I could then look at introducing some adhesive. So this is a mixture of fish glue and methyl cellulose. So the fish glue is a really strong binder. The methyl cellulose as I understand it will add a little bit of flexibility to this join. The white element you can see is a weight so I'm weighting it down. You can see that in the background. As I'm moving the weight I'm adding a little bit of adhesive and I'll move the weight down to keep that tear held together. I'm just using a little pointed tool, a little pin just to apply the moisture and you can see that I'm only adding a very small amount as I go along and then applying a little bit of pressure to that tear as well. One of the things that came across from the workshop was that you have to look at each painting and each damage individually. One adhesive might work for one painting, one might work differently for another one. Because this canvas is so brittle and dry I want to introduce something that will add a little bit of flexibility to that join and by adding the methyl cellulose I believe that's going to give me a little bit of flexibility. The two pins that are attached to the weight are just distributing that weight across the whole tear there so they're going to allow that rip to join together. It's very hot in the studio at the moment so this is drying quite quickly so I can move down and address a different part of the tear quite quickly. Again those little pins are adding a little bit of weight. I can see that my threads have bonded nicely together. It's quite a clean cut I'm not having to re-weave anything and again I can just add that adhesive and it'll absorb in and then it'll be dried fairly fairly rapidly. Once I've gone across the whole of this tear I'm going to apply some bridging threads just to give it a little bit more strength. This was another great technique I picked up from the workshop where you're separating the threads you're going to use. So I've just made an incision at the start point there horizontally and I'm going to pull out all the threads going across and it'll just leave me these individual threads and they'll all be exactly the same length. So once I've got enough to cover the whole tear I'm going to apply a little bit of adhesive to the front and back of them and then I'll cut them and these will be like my ready-made bridges and I can just apply a little bit of heat on the top of them and that will attach them and reinforce my thread repair. So by attending the workshop you get little tips and tricks that make your life a little bit easier. This is a really nice way of getting everything the same length. A lot of the workshop was about preparation. I could pre-prepare a batch of these like I could with the patches and stuff so that when I'm coming to do repairs I'm not doing everything from scratch and a little bit of preparation makes your job a whole lot easier. So what I'm going to do now is use those little threads and I'm going to strengthen my repair on the back of the painting. So it's a bit of a tricky process. So the adhesive that I use is a heat reactive so when I put these in place I'm just going to put them across the damaged area and then I'm going to use a little bit of melonex to press down prevent the glue from sticking to my iron and attach that into place. Things that I discovered during this process was that a my melonex wasn't release melonex so it would lift off the sutures as I was gluing them on so I had to get a different piece of non-stick. Some of the threads had more adhesive on than others. Some it must have missed so next time I do this I need to make sure that both sides of the threads have got the adhesive attached. So they were just a few little learning things as I went along with this. The next thing I want to do is just strengthen part of the tacking edge before I go with the strip ironing. So this is a non-woven polymer. It's a polyester fabric and some people call it Rime and you'll see that it's kind of it's like a very very very thick tissue paper but made out of polymer and it's really good for strengthening and reinforcing things. So before I do my tacking edge repair I just want to strengthen one edge of one of the tacking edges. Again I've got some different adhesives that I want to try. The first one that I've been recommended is an EVA which is an ethyl vinyl acetate and it's supposed to have a good penetration as well so I'm going to try that first and see if that strengthens this tacking edge. I'm just going to cut this strip to match the missing area and then hopefully this will hold in place. So I'm always excited to try new materials and new techniques. Again this isn't a material I've used before. I have heard it mentioned quite a lot so I'm interested to see how it works and if it will strengthen small repairs like this. And in first instance this EVA looks quite thin and watery. I'd expect it to have a little bit more tack and after I'd pressed it for a while and left it for about half an hour I could see that it just hadn't taken at all so it was obviously the wrong adhesive. So I went with a different one which is a Laskow adhesive that was much thicker, much more suitable for strip lining and straight away I could see it attaching to the canvas and attaching the polymer. So sometimes maybe it was my notes or something but that EVA wasn't the right adhesive for this situation. The other thing that I'm looking to try with this painting is using a polyester sailcloth. So from the workshop it was mentioned about different kinds of strip lining techniques and yes you can use linen but linen is susceptible to changes in humidity in the environment whereas this polyester is almost inert. It's very very strong. It won't fluctuate with humidity and it will strengthen these tacking edges. So lots of restorers and conservators are using this polyester sailcloth now. One downside is that it doesn't really blend into the painting. It does stand out quite a lot. I'm kind of interested to see what that will look like. It shouldn't make too much difference as I'm saving quite a lot of the tacking edge but you can see here I've got my strips. I'm using my ruler to mark out the adhesive. So it's just going 10mm onto the inside of the stretcher bars and I'm applying the adhesive to both the linen and the polyester to get a really good bond. Once I'm happy that that's in place I'm just going to roll of that to make a really good adhesion. And this dries quite quickly as well and as I said the studio is very warm at the moment so everything's rapidly drying. And from a first instance I'm quite impressed because sometimes if you would use a linen and an adhesive you'd get a ripple and things would start to cockle but this was just totally stable. Nothing moved at all and that's down to the acrylic, glue and the polyester sailcloth as well. So the last thing I want to do with this painting is just reinforce that tear that I've repaired. So I'm going to make my own patch. I'm using a beaver film which is a heat reactive film which is double-sided and I'm going to be using some of the non-woven polymer. I want the patch to be quite lightweight. I don't want it to telegraph onto the front of the painting. So by using something fairly lightweight I'm not adding anything too overbearing to that tear and I'm just going to reinforce it so that when I do come to do the cleaning I'm not going to be concerned that too much pressure might force open that wound. So this is my patch. I'm just going to cut these to shape and round the corners off. Again something else that was mentioned at the workshop was that your patches should be rounded and they shouldn't have straight edges. So I'm going to do three separate patches here rather than one big one. So the first one's going to come across the bottom. I'm just going to use my heated spatula here. I've removed the release paper from the beaver film and the heat will just transfer this patch to the painting reinforcing that whole join. And that's where things stand today. So full strip line. Damage repaired with the thread repair and the patches. And I've put two small little patches at some other parts of the painting that looked a little bit fragile. It looks very clinical but again looks very strong too. So I'll be excited to see what this looks like when we start stretching it. But I think before we do that we might well put it on the vacuum table, apply a little bit of heat and moisture and just see if we can flatten out that surface, those undulations as well and see what kind of a result we get from that. So that will be the next process that we do and then we will start to look at putting it on the stretcher. But that repair looks really good. It looks really strong. I'm really pleased with how these new techniques and these new materials have responded so far. Right guys I think that's all we've got time for this week. I'm going to let all that settle now. So we've got the strip lining that's going to dry and those new patches as well. It's been a bit of a discovery week for me as well putting into practice all the stuff I learnt in Belfast which has been great. Some things haven't gone quite to plan as I first imagined but I'm happy with the results so far. So join me next week and we will be stretching the canvas and we will start cleaning this painting and trying to discover a little bit more about the sitter and the artist. Thanks for watching guys. Thanks for all your support, all your likes and comments. It's much appreciated. Weather in Manchester today, it is sweltering. It's 32 degrees. I've got some makeshift blinds up on the windows to try and block out the heat but it is absolutely roasting and melting in here. Hope it's good wherever you guys are and I will see you on the next one. All right, take care guys. See you soon. Bye.