Hello. I'm John Chu and I'm here at Anglesey Abbey which has one of the
richest and most diverse collection of oil paintings in all the National Trust collections.
And we're going to look today at the conservation treatment of several of the pictures here,
which are included in the new publication, '100 Paintings from the National Trust Collections'.
Lord Fairhaven collected an eclectic mix of antiques and artwork
that he used to furnish his home, Anglesey Abbey.
The collection here is really extraordinary because it's a very personal collection,
all kind of collected in a particular time. And you can see not only what he liked, but also what it was possible to collect then.
As a paintings curator I'd work with a paintings conservator to ensure
the long-term preservation of the pictures, their stability and their aesthetic appearance.
Structural conservation, aesthetic conservation, and then preventive conservation.
And all of those things together make sure that our visitors see the paintings that we have
in the best light possible now, but also that they're being preserved for future generations.
This is one of the most interesting paintings in the house because if you just walk past it
you might just see a classical European landscape. But if you look a bit closer you see a number
of elements which are clearly not European. So there's coconut palms swaying in the breeze,
there's clearly non-European sculpture. And then the women who are bathing have tattoos on their bodies.
So what this painting actually is, is a picture of Tahiti painted by William Hodges
who was the ship's painter on Captain James Cook's second circumnavigation of the globe.
What we have here is a European artist using the conventions of western painting
to convey a Pacific scene. The mixture of authentic and unauthentic objects so Hodges would have seen
this scene in real life, but he's depicting it as understandable to a European audience.
This is Anglesey Abbey's big Constable painting. It depicts the opening of Waterloo Bridge
two years after the battle of Waterloo, and it's being prepared for a major conservation treatment.
We've done some cleaning tests which involve gently dissolving away
the very upper layers of varnish and you can see there's a rather lovely area
around the bridge where you've got this very natural point at which you can see almost
an explanation of what this painting is going to look like before treatment versus after treatment.
The yellow varnish makes the whites look yellow. They make the blues look green.
It just changes the whole colour spectrum of the picture.
You lose the original surface of the brush strokes so it becomes very congealed and difficult to see.
It was potentially a very large-size sketch and what's interesting, therefore, about it having a varnish
is the fact that it might not necessarily have been intended for exhibition.
And I'm in discussion with the curator John Chu about what questions we've got about it.
And there's some really striking evidence that we're going to be able to look at today in the surface.
This is a painting by Edwin Landseer of Queen Victoria's favourite spaniel called Tilco.
And we're about to take it off the wall in order to examine
the back of the painting and see what kind of artist board it's painted on.
By the 19th century these boards were being sold ready-made to artists.
You can see here is maybe evidence of an older label that might have been relating to
the artist Cullerman that actually made and prepared this proprietary artist board.
We're really grateful that everyone continues to help us
preserve our collections for the future, tell stories both at Anglesey and other properties,
and that we're therefore able to illustrate them in the way that we have in this 100 Paintings book.