So hi, my name is Kristina Mandy, and I'm an Assistant Conservator here at the National Gallery.
I would like to talk to you today about this
particular painting, which is 'A Vase of Wild Flowers' by Adolphe Monticelli.
Adolphe Monticelli was a French artist. Most of his paintings are produced between the 1840s and the
1880s. He was relatively fashionable when he was painting, and relatively well known. So for example,
he was friends with the young Paul Cézanne, and they painted together in Marseille. And Vincent
van Gogh actually really admired his paintings, and he had quite an influence on his technique. So
that's really down to the kinds of paintings that Monticelli was producing, what he was trying
to do with his paintings. Something that sort of developed throughout his painting style but
mostly in the 1870s is that it's no longer really about the subject matter, the paintings
become a bit abstracted, and it's really as much about the surface texture of the painting
as well as the subject matter. They sort of have a dual - they're sort of both vying
for your attention. So the flowers in this painting are nearly to the point of abstraction.
You know, we kind of know they're flowers, but they're also these lovely mixtures of colours,
applied really boldly onto the painting. Van Gogh only learned about Monticelli's paintings
in the year of Monticelli's death, so 1886, but we know that he actually purchased a painting
by Monticelli of flowers, so very very similar to this one, and that's currently in the Van
Gogh museum in Amsterdam. Montecelli had quite an influence on artists like Cézanne, and like Van Gogh,
at that time, but he's an artist that fell a bit out of fashion, and I think that's partly down
to the subject matter of some of his works, you know they aren't the most challenging,
um thrilling, subject matters for paintings, but it's also down to how those paintings have changed
over time. So quite a lot of the paintings have these multiple layers of varnish on the surface
that do have this disfiguring effect, and so all of those goals that Monticelli had, you know, having
you really look at the surface, playing with how under layers, and so the wooden support is visible,
and the vibrancy of his colours, all of that is sort of lost when you have these yellowed and cloudy
varnish layers on the surface. It doesn't allow you to appreciate those factors. And then partly
it's also changing tastes over time, so although he was fashionable sort of at the period when he
was producing paintings, he sort of quite quickly fell out of favour. But that can be seen with
other artists as well. So on the flip side, Van Gogh actually wasn't known at all during his lifetime,
and he only sold one painting before he died. But now, if you talk to anybody, I think they'd
know who Van Gogh is, so it kind of shows you how those things can fluctuate. One of the
hopes with this painting is that perhaps when the treatment is finished, it might hang in the Gallery
perhaps near Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers', which is just returned from its tour in Japan and Australia,
and so maybe you'll be able to kind of compare for yourself and see how much Monticelli influenced
Van Gogh. And the difficulty with Monticelli's paintings is to do with the varnish coatings
on top of the paint having discoloured and changed and yellowed quite considerably over time,
and so the painting is particularly challenging because of Monticelli and his use of materials. He
was really quite experimental, so what he liked to do is mix different materials within his paint
to kind of change their working properties. He also really liked to leave different underlayers and
areas of the painting visible, and so you can see areas where the wood is peeking through,
and then he's built it up to areas of thick impasto, so there's a lot of variation in
surface texture. We did some analysis on the materials on this particular painting
and in addition to the normal thing you'd expect with an oil painting, so drying oil and pigments,
we also found a lot of different kinds of resin, so larch resin, pine resin, Denmark
mastic resins, those materials are kind of mixed into everything, and so the issue really is that
because he used these resinous materials and mixed them all into his paints they're
actually very very similar to the materials on top of the painting, the varnish coatings.
So normally when we would like to clean a painting and reduce and remove those varnish layers,
we would want to use traditional solvents that don't affect the paint layers at all,
but in this particular case, because those resonance materials are mixed into his paints,
it's actually a relatively tricky painting to clean, and a bit of a challenge. I'm in
the process of reducing those varnish layers and I've left certain areas to show you, so for example
these flowers are actually the same flowers, but in this passage
those varnish layers are still present, whereas here they have been reduced. And for example, these
are the same sort of slightly purpley-blue flowers, and you can see on particularly cool colours,
the varnish has a really disfiguring effect because it's sort of impossible to tell what colour
they were meant to be before cleaning because of the kind of green-yellow nature of the varnish,
and so we've regained the colours but also that sense of crispness of the paint. You can really see
all the little dabs of his brush to define all those petals. Another area that I'm in
the process of cleaning is the background. So for example this is an area that has been
cleaned and this area hasn't, and hopefully what you can you can tell now is that we've
regained that sense of depth in the painting, so the background actually recedes behind the bars,
whereas here the varnish has the effect of really flattening the image and making that really
difficult to see. All of the 12 paintings that the National Gallery owns by Monticelli were examined
in 2012, so we had a little bit of an understanding of his materials and techniques then, but in 2018
we decided to have another look at this particular painting, and see what we could learn,
and one of the opportunities we had recently was to look at the painting with OCT scanning.
It's a technique used by ophthalmologists or eye doctors to look at transparent coatings in
the back of your eye, but scientists at Nottingham Trent university have developed this technique and
combined it with spectral imaging, and they use it as a way to look at translucent and transparent
coatings on paintings, and so in particular with this painting, we took a large number of scans,
and the nice thing about OCT scanning is that it's non-invasive. So normally, when we take a sample
from a painting, it is a physical tiny sample from a painting, and tells us information about
that one tiny specific location, but OCT scanning allows you to scan a larger, broader area of the
painting, tells you more information about a bigger area, and no samples need to be taken. Earlier
in the analysis of this painting, we did take a few small cross sections, which are little tiny samples
that are taken from a painting, and one of the ones I want to talk to you about today is a
sample taken from an area of red paint, and what you can see on this sample is that there
are brown layers above the paint, and below the paint, and they appear very very similar in colour,
so if you can imagine in areas of this painting where there isn't much opaque paint,
and where those layers on top are in direct contact with layers underneath, that's really
really then hard to distinguish between the two, but the material on top in the cross
section is the varnish layers, and the material below are the underlayers of the painting.
And what you can see in this cross section is all the material on top looks as if it's kind of one
coherent layer, but the OCT scanning really helped us look at these translucent layers
even even further, and on two scans which I'd like to show you, you can see that actually, rather than
just one thick layer of varnish on top, it's made up of many thin layers of varnish. So there's one
scan taken from the background of the painting where actually the paint is relatively flat,
and you can see there are fewer layers here, but in another scan that was taken from an area of
impasto, so an area of a flower, you can see there are more layers of varnish on top of the paint, but
also that the lowest layer of varnish has really pooled into the interstices and the paint texture.
But also it's actually this lowest layer of varnish that's the one that has
altered, discoloured, and yellowed the most, and from what we know about Monticelli, although
he initially maybe wanted to enhance certain areas of the painting by making them more glossy
or changing the texture, that yellowness isn't something he would have intended for his paintings,
because colour was so so very important to him. So when I'm working on the painting, I'll use
the imagery from the OCT to remind me about what varnish layers and what coatings are on top of the
painting, in certain areas of the painting, but it also really helped inform me about what to expect
in different areas of the painting as well. So I'm using that imagery, I'm also using
my eyes and my sense of what I'm seeing, also ultraviolet light is actually really useful
in working on this painting because some of those varnish layers fluoresce, and so that's another
diagnostic way to kind of look at what I'm doing. If you'd like to know more about our paintings,
please click here or here. Thank you so much for watching, and see you next time.