This is where I've removed the top layer of synthetic varnish
and even though there's still loads of varnish left, just removing the top layer
already is helping with the saturation of the surface, and you can already see
more here than you can here. You can see I hope in contrast that this area which has
all the varnish layers, all over there, it still looks more foggy, here is already a bit clearer.
My name is Hayley Tomlinson and I'm a conservator in the paintings conservation department at the
National Gallery, and I'm currently working on this painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. It's a portrait of
Captain Robert Orme painted in 1756, and in this painting we see a Captain Robert Orme aged about 31.
He's about to jump on his horse and we believe that he's probably taking news of Captain
Braddock's death, and Captain Braddock was the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in
Northern America where they were fighting against the French over who was going to have supremacy
over the American colonies. So we think he's probably taking news of Captain Braddock's
death, but this little piece of paper here is completely illegible, so we don't know that for
sure. But he was definitely involved in this defeat along the River Ohio, and here he is about to
carry news of the defeat to the armed forces elsewhere.
Now this painting, as I said, is by Reynolds. Joshua Reynolds. For conservators he's one of the most
difficult painters to deal with just because he had such an experimental approach.
He was obsessed with the 'Old Masters', he desperately wanted to achieve their sort of
'Old Master glow' and he wanted to uncover their secrets to find out how they did things.
So he was endlessly experimenting, he was always adding things to his paint, mainly
resins, because he wanted to try and have the same optical properties as the Old Masters.
The problem with Reynolds, is it's those things that he added to his paints.
They're very similar to the varnishes that are applied on top,
so the problem for a conservator is that if you're trying to remove the varnish off the top, you have
to be very aware that there could be the same sorts of resin in the paint, and so you obviously
don't want to try and use a solvent that is going to affect the paint which has resin in it.
So for a conservator Reynolds has to be approached with extreme care, and every possible aspect has to
be thought about beforehand. So this painting has come to the conservation studio really because of
the fogginess of the varnish, that's the motivation for wanting to treat it, and we know that the
painting has been treated four times, cleaned four times, since 1863, but it appears that most of those
cleanings have been partial cleanings, so each time some of the previous varnish has been left.
The problem with that of leaving these partial varnishes which have aged is that gradually
the painting becomes increasingly hard to see because you've got this increasingly foggy film
over the top, but what I'm doing is that we're going for a very incremental stage. So all I'm
doing at the moment is taking off the top layer of a synthetic varnish which was applied in 1961.
That's quite nice for us because it has very different properties to the varnishes
applied before and in fact it has a completely different fluorescence as
well. I'm using fluorescent light a lot and the synthetic resin has a blue fluorescence
whereas the natural resin underneath has a green fluorescence, so it's very nice,
I can check quite regularly where I'm up to with what I'm doing.
So all I'm taking off is the blue fluorescence, but the lovely thing is that
even if I keep going, the solvent mixture I'm using for the synthetic varnish doesn't even affect the
natural resin, so this stage of the cleaning is actually quite straightforward. The good news about
this painting is that it was painted relatively early in his career in 1756 when Reynolds was
only about 33 years old, and at this stage he was actually slightly less experimental.
His paint style, his painting technique, at this stage, was a little more conservative - or not
conservative, just normal, orthodox, straightforward. So on the left-hand side, however, there is some
suggestion from cross-section analysis that Reynold may have put a varnish in between the
paint layers, so obviously with that knowledge we know we have to be incredibly careful not to do
anything that would affect the varnish layer that is in between the two original paint layers, so I
mean, it may be that we decide there are certain areas that can't be cleaned at all, it's not safe,
or it may be that we manage to find a solvent combination that will work just on the surface of
the painting that has a very high evaporation rate and low penetration so it is possible to achieve
a good result and to get off more of the old varnish than might have been
possible previously. So at the moment we don't fully know what the outcome will be, but in
partnership with scientific colleagues we will investigate and proceed as far as we safely can.
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