I'm Lynne Harrison, I'm one of the painting conservators here
at the National Gallery.
I'm going to show you what we've been doing with Artemisia
since she's come down to the Lower Conservation Studio
to do the structural work.
So, on the table, this is the 'Artemisia' painting from the back
and you see it at this stage: it's attached to a board for support
and we've put some masking tape around the edges to protect the painting
because we're going to work on the back and we don't want anything from the back
to creep under to the front and scratch the front so it's well protected.
That's the paint surfaces underneath.
What we've been doing is removing the old lining,
which Paul will talk to you about in a moment,
this is the last piece of lining that's left on the back of the canvas
and I'll show you in a moment how this is coming off.
Once this has been removed, we have to remove the remains of the old glue paste
that was used to put the lining fabric onto the back of the painting
and this is simply done by scraping and, again, I'll show you in a moment
how I'm doing that.
Once this is done, we will apply a new lining to support the painting,
which will provide new edges, and stretch it onto its new support
and Paul - do you want to talk a bit about...
Yeah I'm Paul Ackroyd from the Conservation department as well.
We're relining this, really, because the old lining,
which is probably around about one hundred and fifty years old,
has degraded so badly that it's no longer
really supporting the picture.
I mean, you can see from here, this is a piece of the old lining canvas,
it just tears, you know, just like that really and the glue is very badly degraded
so peeling this off is exceptionally simple.
Not all glue paste linings come off quite so easily as this.
The other reason we're lining it is because there's a tear which is here
and that's gone right through the painting and the lining canvas.
In order to repair that, we need to take the lining off and it has a number of other damages:
it has some holes here which have gone all the way through the original paint
and ground and canvas and along here, where the seam is.
So, this is a piece of canvas here which has been sewn onto the other, bigger part
of the picture so this is the bottom of the picture here and that's the top.
This seam has been cut off or cut away in the last lining;
this would have been sewn together and there would have been a flap that came round here.
So that's been cut off and it's probably not very
well attached at the moment so we've probably got to do something to reinforce that as well.
Well, I've removed this last piece of the old lining canvas
and you can see there's two more little holes here,
which have been filled from the front.
Now after that, we'll scrape the rest of this old glue off of here and here,
these darker patches, and then we will repair the tear
and then do some repairs on these various holes.
So here I'm scraping off the glue paste adhesive
from the back of the painting.
This is the old glue paste that was used
to put a lining fabric on.
It's very brittle and hard but it comes away very easily from the original canvas
which is what you can see here.
Once that's complete, we will repair the tear
and these various holes in the canvas
and then do a moisture flattening treatment
on a vacuum table
and then reline the picture, again with glue
paste, a similar kind of adhesive to what we have here.
This is because it's a very good adhesive for supporting quite major
structural weaknesses like this join and tear
and that is a very traditional method of relining
that's existed for 400 years or more.
Most linings have a life expectancy of about
100-150 years and we hope that the lining that we put on
will, at least, last 150 years or more.
And then once that relining has been done then we will
re-stretch it back on to its stretcher and
then it will go back upstairs for the rest of the restoration.