I'm part the way through the retouching, the restoration of the painting and that
entails retouching of the actual losses. Fortunately for a painting this size
there aren't that many losses. As you can see here there's these pale grey losses
which are largely around the edges and across the join. However there is a great
deal of abrasion caused by previous over-cleanings, probably in the 18th or early
19th centuries. I've started retouching at the top in the trees and you can now
see this effect of the canopy the foliage creates over Charles's head and
I've also retouched a bit at the bottom edge and I'm now working on the
sky, I'm nearly finished retouching that area and this was a particularly damaged
area. As you can see in this after-cleaning photograph here where a lot of
this blue colour, particularly here, had been worn away to the grey priming, so
this is a grey priming here, so all that blue paint has been removed in much of
this area and I'm trying to put something back there that doesn't look
too solid and is a bit modulated in the way you've got these sort of bright
blue striations against sort of paler streaks in the sky and once I've
completed the sky I'll then move down to the foliage just below Charles's
shoulder and then I'll start retouching the foreground to reestablish these
planes that go back in space towards the horizon. The loss across the seam in the
middle will be fairly straightforward to retouch. It does look quite obtrusive
with that pale grey filling in. Once that's retouched, as you can see on the
left of the painting across the sky where it's been retouched, it'll be
fairly invisible. That sort of retouching will be fairly straightforward.
What isn't straightforward Charles's thigh which looks rather
withered and thin. There is some paint that has been worn away there. As you can
see here there's a section of rivets for the armour here so this should be darker
here and this butterfly shape would have been a piece of metal attached to the
armour of the knee so that needs reestablishing. The thigh would have sat
in a groove in the saddle so here you have the saddle here which isn't very
well defined and this is the two outer edges of the saddle and the thigh
sits in that groove and Van Dyck has left this really quite sketchy and it's very
difficult to know how finished he intended that area to be and there are
certain other areas like he's left dribbles of paint, you can see here,
coming down over the horse which it would have been partially painted out
later on but would have been left visible. And so to the sort of pentiments
for the drawing of the horse's legs have been painted out a little bit
but have been deliberately left visible to give the idea of spontaneity
and a lack of finish. I expect the restoration of the painting will be
finished in about sort of four to five months time so it should go back on show
in the early summer.
Well, as you can see, the restoration of the painting is almost finished. I'm now
just finishing off parts of the horse. I've nearly completed this rear section,
the legs are pretty much finished as is the neck and head above the central join.
There are some areas like here, the belly, where you can see that where Van Dyck
made an initial drawing for the contour the underside of the stomach
which he painted out and that paint has been removed partially during a previous
cleaning in the 18th or early 19th centuries. So this piece of drawing has
to be suppressed and then there's further abrasion down here which needs
to be addressed. In the rest of the horse the damages are quite discreet: these
small losses here and across the join and there's quite a lot of paint that's
been over cleaned from part of the harness. This leather strap here, it's
largely the black paint which has been taken off. And once that's being
completed we will then discuss the painting with the curator Bart Cornelis
to make final adjustments into the restoration. As you can see the
foreground is really quite sketchy and that's deliberately so, I mean Van Dyck
deliberately left it looking quite unfinished so that you can see all these
sort of pentiments for the horse's legs. There's more drawing here which you
can see which he would have deliberately left partially visible and that
contrasts quite greatly with the horse which is much more finished in, you
know, giving the impression of a nice sleek smooth texture of the horse's coat
and the highly defined kind of musculature. There is a certain amount of
greyness to the foreground that wouldn't have been intended entirely by Van Dyck:
he mixed in a colour called smalt which is a cobalt-based pigment which
would have been finely ground and acts as a dryer; it makes the oil paint dry more
quickly but the downside of using that colour is that, on aging, it reacts with
the oil paint and forms a sort of blanched greyish looking colour and
there's very little you can do about that in the restoration, you have to
accept that. Other areas that have been finished are the sky, the blue skies, and
Charles's leg which was a bit of a problem because that had lost a lot of
the black paint in the groove here in the saddle which made his leg
look rather thin and withered. There's still a little bit more to do but once
that's finished which will be sometime within about a month or so the painting
will then go into a new frame and then in a couple of months will then go back on show in the Galleries.
Well we're standing here in front of the finished treatment really of Van Dyck's
'Equestrian Portrait of Charles I' which looks absolutely smashing
after it's been restored and just as it is quite astonishing how Van Dyck
himself has painted such a large canvas. I mean it's always a mark of a great
painter if they know how to paint such an enormous canvas and still get all the
tonalities right, you know, know where everything is, plan such a thing,
that's not an easy thing to do and I suppose likewise it's not
actually that easy to do the same in a way once you start
restoring it because you have to make sure that once you've done something
there, it does not knock out what else is there,
you know, things like that. I suppose, in a way, that Van Dyck himself
would have had to think about that. Anyway I think it looks
absolutely wonderful and perhaps you can tell us something about what happened?
- Well I think, I mean, I was just really following Van Dyck during the
restoration. I mean I think I found some problems really is when you're
working up on a ladder or at height, you can't really step back and judge
what you've done and I think Van Dyck would have had the same problem when he
would have painted this, probably on a wooden scaffolding. I think the main
areas of restoration that are worthy of note are really the
sky: this patch of blue in the upper left which was very badly worn and
had become quite discoloured in the previous restoration, the previous
retouchings had discoloured and the varnish had discoloured quite noticeably
in that area so I think that's improved quite a bit. And again with the
foreground you now get a better reading of the distance from the immediate
foreground going into the middle distance. - It's amazing how this is opened
up, isn't it because this was actually really quite difficult to read,
this whole area in foreground which now makes sense and you
really feel that you are there, as it were, in that space. I think that's a
great improvement to what was there before. - And I think in in restoring
this area I've been very conscious to leave
the painting look as if it was as unfinished as Van Dyck probably intended
it to be so leaving areas of pentiments like for these horse's hooves and
the legs here and so on and these sort of half resolved shapes of the rocks in
this foreground and similarly here the other area of Charles's thigh and the
saddle cloth and saddle which were all quite badly worn and on top of that
there's a pigment here, indigo, which has faded so it's very difficult to work out
exactly what had happened to that area so it required really quite a minimal
amount of restoration to stop this thigh looking very thin and emaciated and to
reestablish something at the shape of this side of the saddle and the back of
the saddle. - Because that was quite difficult to read wasn't it?
Where exactly his leg was sitting? That's now much clearer, how the saddle actually works as
a saddle. - This leg kind of sits in a groove in the saddle which wasn't
really apparent before.
It was actually quite amazing how it's in such
a good condition, the painting. Really overall you think of it's a large
painting and once the varnish had been taken off and you
could see where the damages were...I almost thought if you were
to reduce that to a small painting, it would be actually in an incredible
condition. I mean, of course, there was lots in the sky that
you had to deal with and things like that where previous cleaning had done some
damage a long time ago and there's the join in the
canvas which was very visible but really on the whole actually
in remarkably good condition. - Well it is really for its size and the fact that
it travelled around so much in Europe early on, rolled up and travelled
by horse and cart and so on, that the actual damages to it
were actually very small,apart from the edges where there was a bit
more damage but the main problem really was the abrasion caused by the previous
cleaning. There weren't that many surprises during the course of the restoration
because the painting has been examined quite a number of times before and it's been
restored here in 1952. So if there were any surprises they would have been
discovered then. I think the thing that surprised me really when we got close up
to it was how cursorily areas of the painting are painted like the trees
which are painted very much like a scene painting for the theatre:
close up they just look like splotches of paint but when you go to a proper
viewing distance they immediately look very three-dimensional, forming this
canopy over Charles's head.
- One of the great joys also of a treatment like
this is that you can think about the frame of the picture and now that the
picture looks so good we can make it look even better by putting a more
appropriate frame around it. There was a sort of 19th century gold frame,
quite ornate, and there's a frame
being made as we speak especially which will be quite a...I wouldn't say simple,
but you know very modest profile really, like you find around Flemish
paintings, mostly black, perhaps with a few gold lines and I've seen a
mock-up and it looks absolutely smashing and it really will bring out the
painting even better.