- In many ways the artists' materials are
what the musical notes are for a composer.
The artist brings together a disparate group of materials,
assembles them into a composition,
and what we see of that composition is on the canvas.
And just the same way that a conductor's job
is to take this set of notes and make
some sense of the unruly orchestra,
a restorer's job is to take the set of materials
which has gone through a lot of transformations,
since it was applied by the artist,
and make some sense of it.
As conservators we have a variety of tools
that have been adapted to give us clues about
what the artist may have had in mind
when he was creating a particular image.
This is the Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis,
which was painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1818
when he was working in exile in Brussels.
We're looking at a detail of the painting
with a technique called infrared reflectography,
which involves taking a camera that has been equipped
with an infrared sensitive tube,
and seeing the reflective abilities of different materials,
different pigments in the infrared light range.
If we take a close look at this area of the painting,
when we look at it with infrared, what we see is that
David went to the trouble to block in the figure in the nude
underneath the drapery, and then to literally clothe him.
David was trained as an academic painter.
Academic painters in France were trained
from a very young age to draw and study the nude.
And one of the reasons you do that
is so that you can get a real sense of form,
not just the surface of the skin,
but the bone and the muscle that's underneath.
When you walk through the galleries,
there're a couple of things that you're not aware of.
One is the fact that the picture has a history.
It has a history from the time that it left the easel,
when all sorts of things began to happen to it.
This is a painting by early 19th Century
German painter named Caspar David Friedrich,
who's an extremely rare artist in this country.
When I first saw the painting at the auction house,
it was in a somewhat disheveled state.
It had fairly discolored runners on the surface,
and more importantly it had a large hole
in this part of the painting.
What I did do, was to repair the hole from the back,
glue some new pieces of fabric
just to the edges of the painting,
which allowed me to re-stretch it onto the stretcher.
And then I prepared the stretcher with,
yet another piece of fabric,
and then the whole package was put back together,
so that from the front you really
can't tell that anything has happened.
So the challenge in the restoration was to take care of
the structural anomalies, this hole in the sky,
but to do the work in such a way
that my presence would be as invisible as possible,
so that all that was left in the end
was the artist's voice speaking to you directly.
We have been able to look at this painting
with infrared reflectography, and underneath the surface
is an extraordinarily elaborate plan.
These trees in the distance,
which have a kind of misty quality, were laid in,
in very elaborate, precise detail,
and then the paint actually played the role of the mist.
Imagine a late afternoon, early evening
when the mist begins to rise from the fields.
Friedrich literally laid in the mist,
laid in the paint the same way
that the mist would have traveled into the field.
and that's one of the reasons that this illusion of a tree
in the mist in the distance, compared to the clarity
of the tree in the foreground is so successful.
Because he's used the paint almost to imitate
the natural progression of the atmosphere.
What appears to be, the essence of simplicity and purity
is often the result of a tremendous
wrestle and struggle with materials.
Paint is a very unruly and difficult substance to handle,
and it's very hard to make it do what you want it to do.
And one of the reasons that artists are such geniuses
is because they're able to take a virtually
unmanageable material and make sense of it,
make it speak, make it say something
and reflect some inner beliefs and feelings that they have.
And that's a tremendous skill and talent and gift,
which is why we appreciate these things today.