Amazing Varnish Reveal on This 19th Century Portrait | Part 2

Last time we began the long journey of bringing this remarkable 19th century portrait back to life. After years spent sitting in storage we discovered just how much damage time had caused. The canvas had suffered a severe impact, the edges had weakened and using a tear mending technique I'd recently learned we carefully repaired what was once a gaping hole through the painting. Today the structural work gives way to the restoration itself. We'll flatten out the canvas on the heated table applying a little bit of moisture to soften the canvas and lay that craquelure flat. Once we've done this we can then start the process of cleaning this painting and begin to see what has been hiding beneath the surface all these years. So just before I put the painting under vacuum I'm using this blotting paper just as a little bit of a barrier to apply some moisture. So the moisture is just going to soften and relax that canvas and I'm hoping that the craquelure on the front of the painting will lay down a little bit more and just have a more uniform finish. To do this I'm going to use a pressurized water sprayer and just apply a really fine mist across the whole of the back of the painting. I don't want to put too much moisture in there so I'm just being very very light and then once this goes on the table I'll apply some gentle heat and I'll allow the vacuum to do its work and it should flatten out this painting and just reduce all that craquelure and cockling to the canvas as well. Now the whole reason I'm not relining this painting is I want to maintain the stamps on the back of the picture. Now I'm not sure exactly what these stamps represent but they are important to the painting's history and with there being just one major impact on that new technique I should be able to do this without having to put a full lining on the picture. So here's my trusty speedy vac pump and while this is getting up to heat and the vacuum is working you'll be able to see the blankets suck flat through these upholstery tape kind of air highways. I can just get through some studio maintenance. So after about an hour the painting should have relaxed so let's remove the blanket and the melonex layers and see what the table has managed to achieve. I can already tell from the paper that's coming off that we've got a very nice flat surface here as well. It's nice to see those stamps intact as well and what has been really impressive is the strength in this strip lining. I've done linings with linen before but the adhesive that we used and this polyester is just so strong and here you can see yes there is craquelure still visible but it's nothing like as pronounced as it was before. It is extremely flat so I'm very happy with that. It looks good. Right guys I'm really pleased with how that's come out there. It's so flat. The tear has flattened out nicely and all that cockling that was through the painting has gone. There's a few little ripples here and there but it's so much better than it was and I was a little bit concerned that it might not go as flat as it has without doing that full reline with the canvas to hold it in place but the canvas is in such good condition that it has just remembered where it needs to be so I'm really pleased with that. So the next stage now is to start with the re-stretching. So I've given the original stretcher a clean and a bit of a tidy. It's quite an unusual design with that angled join in there but it's in good condition and it doesn't need replacing. So once I've made sure that it's square by measuring corner to corner I can offer up the painting back on top and then I just make sure that it's aligned correctly to the stretcher so I'll just fold over these tacking edges on the edge of the support. I'll do this on the horizontal the length way and then across the top as well just to make sure it sits square. I'm going to use some tacks to attach it to the stretcher bar as well. I'm going to try and go through the existing canvas and the new polyester so I'm going to be using new holes where I can so it's got ultimate strength. Now the first ones are always the difficult ones to get in because you don't want the whole painting to slide and move as you're hammering those tacks in. So once I've got the first one in I'll rotate and then again just make sure the painting is square on the stretcher bars. I'll get my tack ready to go. So again just check each corner that I'm square as I need to be and then next tack goes in. What I don't want to happen is the canvas to move as I'm hammering those tacks in so I need to hold it firmly in place and then I'll rotate around again and make sure that I've just got each side tacked in correctly and under tension as well so as I'm pulling it I'm getting it under tension. I'm not using pliers. I don't want to do anything too strong as long as I can see that there is like a drum-like tension to the painting and then you'll have seen me do this before. I'm just going to go all the way around the picture now top left bottom right and just bring the canvas up to tension from opposing sides. I'm going to work all the way up to the edges as well. Once I get to the edges I'm going to trim off that excess. I don't want to be loads of fabric in the corner areas of this painting because I'm going to glue the edges down once I've fully stretched it. Once I've tacked the edges before I glue I want to just bring the canvas up to a little bit more tension so to protect the painting while I do this I just put a little bit of card behind the stretcher bars in between that and the paint surface because what I don't want to do is when I'm hammering in hit the canvas now even though the canvas is in good condition it's very fragile as well and I don't want any impacts to damage the painting from the rear so that's what the card does and then with this under tension now I'm going to trim these corners so cut across and then down at an angle 45 degrees and as I say once I've got all these corners trimmed I'm going to glue the tacking edge to the back of the stretcher now there's loads of different methods you can use to do this I quite like gluing them down I feel like it gives a lot more even support all the way across the back of the painting all the adhesives that I use are fully reversible so if this needs to come off the stretcher in 10 minutes or 10 years you can reverse the glue and the tacking edge will just remove nicely as well but while it's glued on there it's just got extra support now in other videos you'll see me use a hide glue or animal glue for this again traditional but reversible but with this painting and with the new techniques I learned in Belfast I want to embrace using some of these new materials so the glue I'm going to use is Alaska acrylic glue and it's suitable for strip lining and lining paintings I'm not entirely sure how it's going to respond to fastening the polyester sailcloth to the wooden stretcher bars I'm hoping it will be just as firm as it was applying the polyester to the linen before I do that though I'm just going to miter these corners so they sit nicely at 45 degrees and I can match those up so they're nice and neat and to do this I just fold both edges over put my straight edge on at 45 and using a very sharp razor blade just cut through both of those the studio's still very hot at the moment and things are drying quite quickly so I may well need a couple of coats of this adhesive so I think the first coat is going to absorb into the wood and probably act as a bit of a sealer or it might seal that section and I'm going to apply the adhesive to the polyester as well and then force that down with a little bit of pressure what I found is that it did need two coats so I needed the first coat on there which dried rapidly and then the second coat was the one that grabbed so I'm just using some of my weights to keep that down and under pressure and then once I've gone all the way around the painting you can see here he is now fully stretched under tension and ready to start cleaning I'm really excited to start cleaning this painting you can see my test results in that bottom corner there he is going to jump out of this canvas so from my initial tests in the last episode we realized there's multiple layers on this painting there's a dirt layer there's a smoke layer there's two varnish layers at least so I'm going to have to tackle these things as we go along the first one I'm going to tackle is the dirt and smoke layer on the top so to do that I'm going to use an aqueous solution this will just remove any nicotine staining or tar deposits from the painting and it should come off like a very strong deep yellow so straight away you can see that my swab is filling up it's pulling out all that yellowed smoke damage nicotine tar staining and I've done a number of passes here and you can see that it still hasn't got down to the paint layer once I've took that first layer off I'll go in and remove the varnish layer so this is a solvent section now this is removing discolored varnish from the painting so this is probably about layer two and then I go back in with the aqueous solution again and this is removing a trapped dirt layer that is on top of the final varnish layer and you can see now that I'm getting down to my original test patch there that I'm just covering but there's still a long way to go though it is it is so thick and with there being multiple layers and this is just through history people will freshen up a painting by applying a coat of varnish and they'll give you that rich lustre back and that shine and then over years again it gets dirty it gets deposits on there and then someone will come along and varnish it again and then that's how these successive layers build up so I like to start on the strong tones first so I started on that stock which is the white tones they're the strongest pigments and then after that I like to move on to the flesh tones because again there's lots of white pigment in there and they're usually fairly strong the things you have to be careful for are the shadows in the fingers and the outlines of the fingers and fingernails because they're usually like a burnt sienna or sometimes just a very thin glaze so I'm always mindful to be careful of those shadow sections of the hands but you can see here again on the hand I'm having to go through multiple layers to get down to the original paint surface I'm really intrigued to see how much the gold bands on that book clean as well so I'll be excited to get to that I don't know if you can see these little red dots on the painting as well it looks like at some point it's been splashed with either household paint or some kind of emulsion or gloss and we've got white dots here as well so we'll be addressing those separately I always like a hand when you can see the veins through so we can see his knuckles sometimes hands can be really they aren't difficult to to render properly but little details like that like the veins coming through I always like to see that you can see the highlights on his knuckles as well I don't think these are the most elegant hands I feel like his fingers look a little bit chubby and the fingernails look a little bit chubby but they're not bad I've seen worse and it's nice to see that collar or cuff rather come through on his sleeve but this could have been the hands could have been painted by a studio assistant because the face is just absolutely fantastic I mean look at that whoever painted the face I would bet good money that they didn't paint the hands because that face is just on another level so again same process as the stock and the hands I'm gonna go in there take off that top layer of smoke damage tar tobacco staining and you can see how yellow that is I'm just being very careful this painting it is quite fragile I can feel that now as I'm cleaning it I still think it was the right decision not to line it to save and preserve those stamps on the back and keep it as original as possible but I am feeling the fragility of this painting now and I'm going to be very careful throughout the whole cleaning process look at those lovely wisps of hair coming down on the side of his face I feel like he's got a very piercing gaze I can imagine if you saw him across a crowded room you would I don't know you'd feel his gaze upon you it's very striking pose he's got that smile as well he looks quite serious quite determined but I don't know he's full of self-confidence as well the other nice thing about his face is his kind of mutton chops on this side here that has deteriorated a little but that's really nicely rendered and then kind of his what five o'clock shadow on the top of his lip as well is nicely done we do have this damage on the end of his nose and that almost looks like a burn mark it almost looks like someone's put a cigarette out on the end of his nose and it's melted the paint and caused a real kind of I don't know it's rough um it's not a nice texture so as this progresses we'll have to address that damage and we'll have to address the craquelure that's quite deep across the right side and lower part of his face I do wonder where this has hung in its lifetime I think it's obviously been over a heat source or it was dried rapidly remember the Carmichael painting with the deep fishes that was because he tried to dry the paintings quickly to get the commissions out and I wonder if this is the same with this artist he was under pressure to get his paintings finished and to the client so he rapidly dried them or like I said it could have just hung for a long time or an early part of its lifetime over a heat source or open fireplace I love seeing the brightness of that stock and collar contrasting with his skin tones and with his face I was hoping for a little bit more of a dramatic kind of reveal but that's just because of the layers involved you can see the right side I've took all that smoke and tobacco staining off and then I have to balance that out on the left hand side and the white bloom you can see that's from one of the varnish layers so as that reduces and removes some deposits remain on the painting as a bloom which will remove and then my least favorite cleaning brown smoke nicotine tobacco off a brown background so I'm going to speed through this background clean because all I'm going to be showing you is deep layers of brown and the same on the other side it's still worth doing though it's still worth cleaning I want the whole painting to be clean from any kind of deposits or staining and on this top section here we've also got those red splashes of paint these little tiny dots they do flick off so they're just not completely fused to the surface so they might be fairly recent so my nails are fairly soft rather than use something hard like a scalpel or a spatula I'm just going to use my nail edge this organic matter on semi-organic matter and I feel like it kind of safely removes those so you can see there's some further spots on the top right and out of your screen as well so I'll just address those but again I'm being very careful with this painting because it is still in quite a fragile state I'd say a couple of commenters suggested impregnating the full canvas with an adhesive and I didn't really want to do that either I think you've got to be really careful about what you're applying to the backs of paintings because once you impregnate something it's really difficult to remove that whether that's wax resin whether that's beaver whether that's Alaska or another kind of adhesive so for that I am reluctant to do that at this stage this painting has got plenty of life in it still from being striplined and if in 50 years time or 100 years time another restorer wants to make a decision on the importance of the structural integrity rather than saving the historical elements of those stamps then that's on them but the moment I think the interventions that we've done are enough to keep this painting safe and secure for the foreseeable so with the majority of the cleaning complete I'm just going to use a mineral spirit now just to neutralize any cleaning agents that may still be slightly active on the surface and this just gives me a good indication of how the clean has gone any elements that may need further attention or any areas I'd like to readdress right guys I have cleaned the painting now there's a few little areas that I might address again but for the most part it's cleaned I've took off various different layers of dirt and nicotine tar staining and varnish layers and he looks so much brighter I'm really happy with how he's turned out he he looks fabulous he's got such a good face and that Brutus hairstyle is just fabulous I'm just showing you there on the back as I've been cleaning the canvas it's really dry it is really brittle there's a couple of areas where I feel like it needs a little bit of reinforcement there's some old damage there that's uncovered during the clean and I've just put a little bit of that raymare woven polyester just to kind of secure that and give it a little bit more support and when it goes back in the frame later on I think I'm going to support it from the back as well either with a sailcloth lining or a like a pad just to kind of protect a little bit but next thing now is to apply a barrier varnish and then we can start to look at retouching in that crackler on his face so let's do that next so the barrier varnish is a hydrocarbon fully reversible varnish it's got good light fast properties it's not going to yellow over time and what I like to do is put this over the painting once I've cleaned it so I'm keeping the painting now is original as I think it is ever going to be as the artist intended it so by applying the barrier varnish any of the retouching that I do on the varnish not the original paints so there's no chance that it can fuse to the original painting which can happen and it just provides me an opportunity now to see how this painting looks fully saturated as well so I do love this part of the process the varnish is going on it's saturating that paint layer and those colours are just starting to come through and we get the depth it brings the painting back to life so you can see those eyes now crystal clear and then all those lovely tones in his face and the contrast with the stock as well it just looks fabulous so I really enjoy putting this barrier varnish off and it feels like you've um I don't know it's a bit of a milestone in the restoration process you've done the structural work you've done the clean work which can be a little bit stressful because you've got to make sure you get the layers right but once you put in that barrier varnish back on you're putting the painting back together if you like and he looks great I love that he's got his jacket and he's got his gown over his shoulders as well you can see that sweeping fabric coming around there that must signify something as well but I also feel like by adding the varnish layer I am giving the painting a little bit of its strength back as well you can see how very light it is so again I'm being extremely careful with this brush as I go perpendicular and make sure I don't miss any part of this painting with the varnish but yeah he's just coming back to life now and looking absolutely amazing so that's going to take a couple of hours to dry and then what I'd like to do is just show you the progress of what we've done today so this is how the painting arrived dirty discoloured yellowed got the damage in there and then this is how we leave the painting today after we've had it on the vacuum table cleaned it removed all those different layers and then applied that barrier varnish just to bring him back to life and yeah what a what a fabulous painting this is all right guys I'm afraid that's all we've got time for this week I hope you enjoyed that episode um he he looks great I'm so pleased with how he's turned out the colours just the face whoever painted it is just fabulous so hopefully next episode we'll dive into who the sitter is who the artist may be and we'll also start to retouch in that painting and sort all that crackler out um I'd just like to say thank you to all my patrons for supporting the channel it means the world to me to know you're there and you've got my back welcome all my new subscribers too thanks for your likes we've passed 75 000 subscribers on youtube which is just incredible absolutely incredible so um that's been fantastic to watch that grow as well um weather report Manchester is nice and sunny at the moment we've had a couple of heat waves which have been absolutely unbearable but it's absolutely well it's it's calmed down a little bit now it's sunny it's not too hot there's a bit of a breeze it's bearable I think is the word that I'm looking for so I hope you're all well wherever you are in the world I hope you have a lovely weekend and I will catch you all on the next one okay guys take it easy thanks for watching bye