So now you see the 'Artemisia' partway through its lining treatment.
Once the moisture treatment had been done, this was the next phase.
You can see the painting's now attached to its new canvas support.
We've allowed it to dry a little and now we're going to remove the facing that's
on here: it's a protective tissue facing which is on the surface, so that we can inspect
the surface of the painting and make sure that everything is as
we want it and that the first stage of the lining has achieved what we wanted
and then after that we will apply another tissue facing and we'll continue
with the second phase of the lining treatment.
White spirit is a very innocuous kind of solvent for this age of painting and
for most paintings pre the 18th/19th centuries it really doesn't do anything
to the paint surface. The paint has hardened and aged to a point where it's
no longer susceptible to such kind of mild solvents.
So this is the facing tissue just coming off now. Because we've solubilized all of
the wax before we did this, it just peels away really easily.
There's still wax on the surface there but that's okay we can use that
in the next stage of the lining as well but this is really just
so that we can check the surface
So here we're just taking off the last little
bits of facing that got stuck to the very edge.
So now we're just putting the
new facing on, having looked at the surface which looks very good.
We're going to lay this over the front of the painting and then we're going to iron
through it with some more beeswax.
So we just need to start from the middle out,
get it nice and flat. It'll tack on to the surface of the
picture because of the wet white spirit.
So this is just beeswax going on to the iron which I'll then apply to the front
of the picture and the beeswax will lubricate the action of the iron.
I'm not applying any pressure to the iron, I'm just using the weight of the iron on its
own and then starting from the middle working outwards so that we don't get
any creases in the facing tissue and as we do this, as you can see, the front of
the painting becomes visible again so we can actually see what we're doing as
we're ironing and it's important to keep the iron moving; you don't really want to
leave it, you know, like that in one place otherwise you get a mark of the iron in
the picture and it's a very good system of lining to support things like tears
in paintings. That's why we've chosen this particular way of doing it
but this way of doing it has existed from really about the early
17th century so it's about 350/380 years old and what we're doing now isn't very
different from what people would then use to line paintings.
When you've gone over the whole thing and you feel you've looked at the
entire surface again as you're ironing through and just checking that there
aren't any anomalies and just to make sure you've gone over the surface quite
evenly that's about it actually.
At the same time you're drying the painting out:
you can see here there's quite a bit of moisture left on
this release sheet and now that's beginning to sort of dry out a little
bit and all this is the white spirit from the facing removal so
we will leave this now overnight to dry until tomorrow when we will iron
through a beeswax moisture barrier into the back
So this is the next day and we are carrying on with the last stage of the
lining treatment. The painting is completely dried out now, there's no
moisture left at all and this next stage is to apply a moisture barrier which we
use beeswax for and this is what Paul is in the middle of doing. We've just got
the last stage to do here. Paul will carry on just finishing off this and
I'll explain that the reason for putting a moisture barrier on to the back of the
painting is predominantly because of the lining there's a lot of animal glue in
the structure of the painting now and that's very responsive to moisture
changes in the environment and we want to reduce that movement of the painting,
if possible. We also have very good environmental control in the Gallery so
it's unlikely that we need to but it's a precautionary measure so that the
painting is not susceptible to changes in moisture in the
environment and helps to preserve the lining for as long as possible.
What Paul has done is, if you can see here, the painting is
this big; it comes to here, but we've included the moisture treatment on
to what will become the new tacking margins of the painting so the whole
structure is protected and will respond in the same way to fluctuations in the
environment. So once Paul is finished doing this corner we'll turn the
painting back over, put it back onto the supporting baseboard and we'll take off
the protective facing that's on the front in the same way that we did it
previously and then after that, the painting will be removed from this
temporary loom and stretched up onto its existing stretcher. We're going to reuse
the stretcher that it was on before we started the treatment and that's the
treatment finished so it will go up to the studios upstairs for the restoration of
the image.