(gentle classical music)
- Joshua Reynolds was one of the most celebrated artists
in the history of British art.
Through his painting and teaching,
he dominated artistic life in Britain
in the mid to late 18th century.
Anyone who was anyone was painted by Reynolds.
Over the course of a career spanning 50 years
he transformed what a portrait could be.
And in his role as founder president of the Royal Academy,
to his teaching and art theories,
he shaped the School of British Art
well into the 19th century.
English Heritage cares for many works by Reynolds,
17 of which are at Kenwood.
To understand more about Reynolds as an artist,
and in time for his 300th birthday in 2023,
we've been closely examining
four of the paintings from Kenwood
and our conservators have been treating two of them.
- So one of the paintings that we've been looking at
is possibly the last portrait that Reynolds worked on.
It's of Miss Cox and her niece.
And we knew it was very yellow.
We knew it hadn't been treated for a long time
and we were keen to have a look
and see if we could make any improvements.
One of the things that we know
about Reynolds' technique is,
as conservators,
it makes our life very difficult
because the materials that he used to paint
can be very susceptible to the sorts of solvents
that we would normally use to clean a painting.
So we have to be really careful
that anything that we decide to take off
is definitely not by him.
He was renowned for coming back to his pictures
and fiddling with them,
after perhaps he'd already varnished them
and putting further layers of paint
on top of varnish layers.
He'd also sometimes mix the varnish in with his oil paint,
which makes it tremendously difficult
to really work out that what we are taking off
is really something that shouldn't be there.
So one of the things that was quite interesting
when we cleaned the painting,
or started the process of cleaning the painting,
is the area of the landscape
had been really heavily disfigured
by a very thick layer of darker varnish.
And removing that reestablished the fact that
the sitter is sitting on a stone bench
with a landscape in the distance behind it
and the cooler tones that we have regained
as a process of this cleaning
really make a lot more sense now
in the composition.
- This painting by Reynolds is of Master Philip Yorke.
It was painted in 1787.
It's got this very yellow varnish on it
and the varnish is quite degraded now.
And we wanted to look at
whether that could be removed safely.
First of all, I looked with ultraviolet light,
which is really helpful for looking
at the surface layers of the painting.
You can also see there are some darker areas.
These are areas of retouching.
We knew that it was treated in the 1990s.
A wax polish had been put on,
and then it was treated before that
in the 1950s by a restorer called Buttery.
I had a really good look at it under the microscope
and I could work out that a very old layer
had been put on the painting,
which was a sort of toned varnish layer.
And when we did the medium analysis on them,
we found that they did contain pine resin,
which is quite unusual.
And then further analysis was done
on the paint layers themselves
and that was found to contain oil,
plus this pine resin again.
So unusual to have pine resin.
And it indicated that probably
that layer was put on by Reynolds himself.
The pine resin layer is very similar
to the glaze layers that Reynolds applied finally.
So they were mixed with oil and resin
and they're very thin and delicate.
So I don't think it's possible
to clean the painting any further.
However, that doesn't mean that in the future
there might be another way,
another technique that comes available.
And we've learned an awful lot about
the painting and his technique.
(gentle classical music)