Hi, my name is Britta New and I'm one of the Conservators here at the National Gallery.
I carry out all aspects of conservation and restoration treatments on the paintings here
but my specialism is in the structural repair of the wooden panels that we have. We're looking at
Rubens's 'Het Steen'. My colleague Larry Keith has finished cleaning it recently and he's passed it
on to me to make the structural repairs, make an initial assessment of what's needed but also
to look at the original construction that Rubens's panel makers used to put the panel together.
The 'Het Steen' was painted on a panel made from oak.
Oak was the usual material for wooden painting supports in the north of Europe at the time and
Rubens's panels tend to be made from this species. In southern Europe, in countries such as Italy,
paintings actually tend to be executed on poplar. Oak and poplar panels have got very different
properties in terms of strength, durability and their propensity for woodworm infestation and they
also tend to have very different construction requirements because of these properties.
Before the project started I had done some initial assessments of what we thought we needed in terms
of repair and had already looked a little at the construction but it was very difficult to see
what was going on in the panel because of the way this layer of what's called alabastine has masked
much of the reverse of the panel then we need to be able to see that in order to
carry out these sorts of assessments. So the first job really for me is to remove this coating layer.
The safest way to remove the alabastine coating is to moisten it slightly and scrape it off. So here
we're using an aqueous silica gel and we brush that on and very quickly scrape it off again.
It doesn't take long for it to hydrate the coating and we don't want the moisture to get into the
back of the panel so it's quite a quick process and it's very effective. Now this alabastine
was put on in about 1950 following a big damage to the panel that happened in 1947 when there
were some great frosts in London and this panel had a very severe damage: it was split all across
the entire panel between different boards and caused a lot of damage. Now the alabastine was
put on the back as an attempt to imitate the original chalk coating that has been damaged
but is still evident on the back of the painting and we can see it quite clearly across much of
the painting. Now that was applied really as a means to regulate the uptake of moisture into
the back of the painting to try and stop too much movement of the wood that happens when there are
big fluctuations in relative humidity. We now have incredibly good air conditioning throughout the
Galleries and that stops a lot of problems of this type that we don't really face so much anymore.
So the painting was made in three stages. The first campaign started off as being
a panel made in the normal way, made out of three boards and the grain was orientated horizontally.
It was then, during the second campaign, enlarged on both sides and along the bottom
and the way that they enlarged that panel is actually quite important and significant to us.
If you try and join two end grain pieces of timber like this it's a very, very weak join.
So what they actually would have done is made a half lap join like this which is much stronger:
it has a much greater surface area touching but it does mean that what we see on the reverse is
different from what we see on the front and that makes it a little bit more difficult for us to
understand where the joins are and what we're seeing on the x-rays and the different imaging
techniques that we can use to try and decipher the construction of the painting. What's also
quite difficult to decipher is where you have a butt join of two planks
like this. If they've been well joined it's very, very difficult to actually see that join
and we're still looking to try and verify where we believe some of those joins are
in the way the painting has been constructed and sometimes that makes a difference in terms of
where splits might be opening up or where we would want to place supports on the reverse when we're
looking at how we're going to support the painting by itself because it's not going to be a panel
that's self-supporting. For the size of this panel it's very, very thin and that's really to do with,
I think, the three campaigns of construction because it had started off as a much smaller
painting that wouldn't have needed to have been so thick and then, as different parts were added on
and the panel grew sort of fairly organically, it wasn't made any thicker and for us now it
means that it's really quite a fragile panel because it's so thin in comparison to the size
and we have to be very mindful of that when we're thinking about the treatment. Interestingly,
on this painting, we have got some non-original additions on the panel: we've got an addition
across the bottom that is probably poplar, we're not absolutely sure about that because
the painting was in Genoa for a time so we think there might have been some additions made then;
there's also an addition on one side and that addition has been put against the grain of the
rest of the painting and that does cause problems because the wood will shrink differentially along
the grain and across the grain. So when you have something that's cross grain it shrinks more
across the grain and if it's locked from moving, by having a cross-grain piece put against it,
it can often sort of like form splits and openings and we actually have got some damages along that
edge where there is a very small sliver of a piece running across the grain. We've got splits that
are actually opening up because of that piece so that's something that we also need to address.
The first part of the conservation treatment of the reverse of the painting is to remove
this filler that was put on as part of a repair treatment that was carried out because of a big
split that happened because of the great frost. At that point the painting was treated structurally.
These are very typical of repairs that have been done at the Gallery in the early part of the
20th century. We see a lot of buttons and sort of repairs like this on the back of panel paintings.
They're essentially a bit like sticking plasters where a panel has moved or there's been a split
or a disjoin between boards and the boards have been reunited and then these buttons are put on
to give some sort of like structural strength and stability. If a panel is well joined it
doesn't tend to need these sorts of buttons and I'm finding that, on this painting, quite a lot
of places where there are buttons actually the glue in that repair has failed anyway. So
many of these buttons I'm going to have to remove in order to carry out repairs. There
are some buttons here that I've removed because there is a split across this part of the painting
and you can see, if you very gently flex the painting, you can see that there is a line of
movement along this crack which is an old damage but it's probably propagated and become worse so
it's something that we need to repair and in order for me to be able to actually get glue into that
I need to remove these buttons and there are a few places that I'm going to have to do that. There's
lots of bits of tape on the back of the panel where I've just been marking out where I can see
that there are obvious places that the painting is moving. This is a very obvious split here.
Actually along this edge there is an addition that was put on probably when the painting was in Genoa
in the 1800s. It's a piece of timber that was put on across the grain of the painting and that means
that the panel is more prone to split because of the different orientation of the grain of the
original boards. This little addition is actually half-lapped on so you can't really see it from the
back and there's a similar addition down here but that's running in the same grain direction so it's
not really such a problem but there are places along here, this is why there are probably more
damages along this edge than there are on the other edge so these all need to be repaired. In
a couple of places where I know that I have to do these repairs I've cut through the little piece of
addition that's left so that I can actually move the painting, make sure I can get the glue in,
and here the split is actually opened up against this cross grain piece
and so I have to take a small piece of that out so that I can actually close it up and we're just
looking to see if it would be possible to remove that addition or not. There are a lot of problems
structurally with doing that and with the paint film on the front so I'm just looking at the best
way as well of of dealing with that addition that has caused some problems in the past.
So we're still really at the beginning of the structural treatment of this painting.
I just need to finish removing that filler from the corner there which means that we've
got a much clearer view of everything on the reverse, much easier to start looking
more closely at the construction of the panel but also making sure that the repairs can be
carried out. When we repair some of the splits we will have to turn the painting over so that
we've got sight of the paint surface because we need to make sure that the levels of the
front of the paint surface are aligned and we also want to look at the overall
plane of the painting as well to make sure that that is consistent across the surface as much as
possible and once we have carried out all of those repairs, which are actually quite complicated on
this because some of them are simply between parts of the campaign. So there is a split
along here in the centre of the panel that's quite hard to access but it's not insurmountable.
Once we've done those repairs then we need to look at how the panel can be supported and
that's quite complicated as well. There are various options of what we can do in terms of
a secondary support and we're still deciding what's the best option to use but it will need
some form of secondary support because it's so thin for the size of it and for the fragility of
the painting that we need to construct something for that as well and then at that point it'll go
back to Larry again and he will do any filling and start the restoration of the paint surface.