Restoring 19th Century Portrait of Harriet Nicholls episode 1. #paintingrestoration #artrestoration

Hello, bawb, welcome to the Bloomfield Art Studio. This is the first episode of probably three. I have a wonderful portrait that requires a considerable amount of work, so Welcome along, hope you enjoy what you see, and yeah, let's get started. Okay, here's the portrait—it's about 80 by 90 centimetres, and it's of Harriet Nichols. There's Quite a few impacts—you can see a large one there, another one here, and then we've got this one. a large horizontal tear that kind of goes down; there's a really large vertical tear that's about six inches long, this L-shaped one goes all the way down and then extends horizontally We've got a puncture hole here, with various bits of paint splashes on it. It's very dirty. may have been stored in some kind of cellar. So here you can see the tack edge has deteriorated. Quite badly, all these tacks have kind of rusted; the canvas is coming away from there. Very poor on that bottom edge—there must have been moisture stored somewhere damp. This is the signature on the back or writing on the back; I can find an R. R. Reynagle and a Philip. Reynagle, but not an R.G., so I might need to look into that a bit further. The stretcher bars look good; the stretch is in quite good condition. I also need to take a closer look at this. Parcel tape on the back—it's been applied there to prevent that tear from spreading further. It's done it. served its purpose, but I do need to remove it since it's covering some of the tears. might need to do is face that from the front so that when I do remove that Taping it won't make that tear any worse. So yeah, lots to do—let's get going. So it stretches off now, I can kind of try and start to flatten some of these areas down. Over the years, there's been dust, dirt, and rubbish piled up back here, so I'll give it a bit of a clean-up. Only a few Christmas tree pine needles here, no fail—there are a couple right there. They get everywhere, don't they? Anyway, that's going to get cleaned. I'll look at removing this tape from the back and then flip it over, and put some facings on. On those tears, make sure they don't go anywhere and get it ready for the next stage. It's all dirt and dust and stuff; it's a horrible, filthy job. Not my favorite part, but um, it needs to be done. I'm going to clean this whole thing up now. Get it ready for the next stage. So cleaned the rest of that off, now brushed it all down, got rid of it. some dirt, and yeah, I'm going to start preparing it for the next part, which is going to be, uh Lining the fabric, so face it off, face it off. Okay, bye. Okay, so I'm just making some wheat. starch paste at the moment I've got this neutral pH pure wheat starch neutral pH pure wheat starch which is just like a powder, and I've added one teaspoon of starch and five teaspoons of water Put that in there, mix it up, and then you can microwave it a few times. So microwave this. For 20 seconds I've done it three times, mixed it up, and it's kind of got this gloopy consistency. texture not smooth enough yet, but I'm going to let it cool down and then dilute it so I can add my pastings. As you can see, all the facing tissue has now dried, and that will help keep the tears from spreading Nice and secure, so I'll be able to turn this over now and start looking at the back of the canvas. She's been de-stretched, relaxed, face turned upside down, and now she's being flattened. I'm going to leave her there; I might add a few more weights for a few hours, but it's five. It's o'clock now, it's Friday, it's time to go, so I'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to hit subscribe, like, thumbs up, get in touch, and leave a comment—let me know what you think. What you'd like to see more of, and yeah, catch you soon. Have a nice weekend, okay? Cheers, guys. Thank you. Which camera am I looking at?