The Conservation function carries on
even in lockdown,
and while we may not be doing as much
active treatment, we're still involved both on-site
and remotely, looking after the
Collection. That is to say, we keep an eye on
the environment and the conditions,
working with our colleagues in the
Building Department. We also
come and do visual inspections of the
works, both on display and in the
conservation studios.
Hi, this is Larry Keith, Head of
Conservation and Keeper at the National Gallery.
We looked before the cleaning of
Rubens's 'Het Steen', and now
I'm going to talk to you a little bit
about the next phase of the project.
Now that you've seen both the cleaning
and the structural treatment
shown to you by my colleague Britta, I'll
talk a little bit about
the next stage, which is the retouching
that is the making
good of the losses and damages and
the final phase that we do.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to do this
on my own. I'm working,
because of COVID restrictions, alone, in
a rather gloomy January afternoon,
and so this has got a slightly handmade
quality in this video, so I hope you can
bear with me, but
you can see, after cleaning, all those
qualities we discussed before with this picture are
really very much to the fore. The
wonderful colour relationships, the
fantastic sweep of the vista, the detail,
the brush work,
and really the question of retouching
now is making good
the losses and damages that have
occurred, and doing very small and precise
adjustments to unlock the
true glories really of Ruben's brushwork,
which I can show you in some detail later.
It's important to remember a few things
about the modern method of retouching,
and the most important, significant, is that
all the retouching we do is on top of
the varnish we apply to the picture after cleaning.
So that means the varnish is the kind of release layer
that allows us to remove our retouchings
very very easily.
Much of the picture is painted over a
kind of tiny orange
streaky priming layer that Rubens let's show through,
in varying degrees, purposefully to create the
kind of effects he wishes for. Here you
can see it showing
a bit in an area like this,
and if I move slowly across you can see
it showing more and more in other areas.
Now where the painting is a bit thin,
where it has some damages,
here again, not damaged, but you can see
how beautiful the effect is of having
the orange layer coming through,
how much motion it gives and vivacity to
the paint surface,
but an area where the paint is more
actually damaged,
as we start to do our retouchings, we absolutely
begin by copying that
warmer under layer, and then we pull across
the bluish grey colour of the sky itself.
Rubens was particularly masterful, I
think, at understanding how
to exploit the properties of under layers,
and letting them show through the paint
he applied above, and so when we talk
about having to
copy that layering system, and the
retouching we apply now,
it's particularly useful to see in an
area like the sky,
or in this painting where the orange
warm primings that are underneath most
of the picture
are purposefully left to show through, and
so when we go about reconstructing
areas of loss, we absolutely have to copy
that system, and you can see that
in a couple of details.
So now that the restoration is
effectively finished, I've got a little
bit to do with the last
adjustment to the varnish, and some work
just tweaking here and there on some of the
adjustments to earlier retouchings that
I've started, but you can see now,
without entering any interruption from
loss or damage,
just how effective this amazing depiction,
this panoramic sweep and recession
and sense of light raking across the
surface, early morning sun.
It's been really thrilling to work on,
because as you work and appreciate each
and every detail, incredible fluency
with which Rubens worked,
his absolute understanding of paint. And
there's every kind of application,
quick gestural, kind of glaze-like
effects, thick impasto,
careful work, quite fast,
in absolute and complete control.
What I'm going to do now is put
the last bit of varnish on a spray
application. It's typically the last
thing we do, and it's really just to even
out the saturation and gloss, because
sometimes that gets
a little bit disrupted by our retouching.
It's much much less varnish than a
typical spray coat, and it's really just
about giving that final
unified and even surface to the picture.