With panel paintings
of this age, after all it is 470 years old
frequently they can be unstable the paint can flaking off
often the panel support can be cracked or broken
but actually for its age its remarkably well preserved
Well first of all you take the painting
out of its frame and you look at it in really good light, the back
and the front of the painting. Then generally
I look at the painting under the microscope, and under the microscope you can see
all sorts of things. I realised that it was covered in a
degraded and discoloured varnish and that there were many
old retouchings and that the background seemed to be
repainted. I’ve started cleaning it,
I’ve started removing the varnish layers and
you can see that on the painting at the moment there are parts where
there is still a yellow layer, the face
still has the discoloured varnish covering it and that’s the next thing
that I will be cleaning
So far I can see that there is already
a big difference in the colours that you can see here
There is a lovely bright pink and white shirt visible just under
Edward’s chin
You can also see some of this more subtle detailing
in his jacket, the red modelling
here and here and also the very very fine delicate
shell gold decoration
The painting is
finished and I’ve completed my restoration
As you may remember the varnish was quite discoloured and there were lots of
discoloured retouchings on the painting
By removing the discoloured varnish
we can now see a lot more detail and modelling in the face
the colours of the costume are more apparent
and the background is more of a unified colour
There was overpaint in all the areas of flesh painting
particularly in the hands, quite crude retouching which covered
original paint. There are some old flaking damages
in these areas and by removing the overpaint I have actually
revealed a little bit more of the original paint. The collar was over painted
you can see that there is a very fine transparent white
layer around the edge of the this pink collar and I think a previous restorer obviously
felt
that this line was a bit messy or couldn’t understand it in terms of what
the costume was
and so this was actually overpainted with quite crude restoration
We also have this little triangular section in the top left-hand corner
which is a complete loss in the painting
There is a section of wood which has been joined
to the original painting and the green colour
on this section is a different green to the rest of the painting and we know
from our analysis that the pigment is based on Prussian Blue
which is a pigment which was only invented in the eighteenth century
so we know that that the triangular section in the top left hand corner
the earliest it can date from is the eighteenth century
so it’s not a mend that was carried out at some point close to the manufacture of this painting
All the materials that we use
are reversible as far as we can tell and so far as our
scientific testing can tell. We wouldn’t be using any materials which we felt were
going to be difficult to remove
in the future, and all the materials we use
are hopefully light fast so they won’t change too much
in the future. You have to have as light a touch as possible, particularly with a
portrait
You don’t want to apply
a lot of overpaint, you want to actually just retouch the
actual damages, the losses, in as delicate and subtle
a manner as possible, so that you are reintegrating any damage
or abrasion, or loss and not actually applying something which is
potentially your own interpretation
Applying the gold for the retouching was quite tricky
I wanted to use real gold, I wanted to use the materials that were use
in the painting. I could have in fact retouched
using a yellow ochre pigment
such as this which restorers sometimes use to mimic
gold, but in fact I decided to
use real gold leaf
and I applied that in tiny little sections
by putting a little bit of resin underneath and then
sticking the gold on top and then glazing it in the same manner
as the artist. For the linear decoration
the artist used a type of gold which
was called shell gold, that’s ground up
real gold powder ground in
a gum, and it’s called shell gold because originally
it was held in a little shell. The eyes were the most difficult area of the painting to
retouch
there are quite a few cracks and damages here
and the pupils were damaged and
over retouched, so the actual black retouching in the pupil
went over these very very pale blue eyes
that Edward was known to have had actually
So I had to remove all the retouching from the eyes
and then very carefully just put in the very minimum amount of black, blue
and brown for the eyelashes and the shading
as I could get away with, literally the minimum, and sometimes I had to
take it off if it felt too heavy and put it back again
just to get to that point where I felt I had
dealt with the damages and that the eyes worked again
The conservation profession is
enormously multi-layered and that’s what makes it
challenging and fascinating to me, but ultimately
I still get a real kick out of taking an object such as this
off a museum wall, bringing it back into a studio environment
taking it out of the frame, handling it, examining it
really closely and by doing so I just feel much closer to the
artist and to the time it was created