Michael: This painting by Henri Rousseau is called "The Sleeping Gypsy."
It was painted in 1897.
It depicts a lion coming across a sleeping woman in the desert.
It's really one of my favorites of Rousseau's paintings.
It seems like he's watching over her in a way,
maybe protecting her rather than thinking about lunch or dinner.
Henri Rousseau was a self-taught artist who was based in Paris.
His subjects included jungle scenes and we know that Rousseau never left France,
it's not that he traveled to Morocco or other parts of Africa and witnessed these kinds
of subjects
but that he imagined them with the help of some of the things he saw in Paris.
And the one source that we know of for the Sleeping Gypsy for the lion is a bronze sculpture
that's in the botanic gardens that he would have seen.
Rousseau wrote to his hometown of Laval offering them the painting for 1,800 Francs.
Whatever happened, the painting did not end up going to Laval but basically it disappeared
from view until 1924.
The painting was supposedly found in a charcoal merchant shop in Paris.
You wonder you know, how it was displayed.
And if, yeah, at some point, we know it was quite dirty.
The dealer who was associated with it wrote to us and said that he had had it cleaned
and varnished.
So, it has had several conservation treatments.
Some of the treatments we know exactly what happened.
Some we don't know exactly.
Part of the detective work really was just going to our archives in the painting and
sculpture department, and seeing what kind of written documentation there was
And it turned out there was quite a bit, letters from Rousseau and then we also had some photographs,
early photographs from the 20s and the 40s.
After consulting the documentation, then, of course, we have the painting here in the
studio, we look at it under different lighting conditions.
And that includes infrared light, ultraviolet light, even x-ray.
The painting had never been x-rayed so we were keen to do that.
It’s been on continuous view so it’s really the first time we’ve been able to spend
time with it and get to really know the painting.
All those different techniques give us clues to the condition of the painting that's very
helpful for
starting any kind of treatment.
The sky looked particularly blotchy because the old restorations no longer matched and
we knew also that it had at least three layers of varnish on it that had been applied over
the years.
And some of those had discolored quite markedly.
Diana: What you’re seeing here is the fully stitched together xray.
This can tell us you know, this tear is actually pretty significant over an inch or two of
the mouth
or down here a very old repair might be hard to see because they might have used the paint
like that is very similar to the original paint, so oil paint over oil paint,
but we can see that there is something going on here that doesn't look great.
All of this darkening you know something happened to the original paint and then new paint was
added to fill that loss.
Compositional changes are always interesting so finding a vessel where there is no longer
a vessel is always kind of surprising and exciting.
Now that we know it's there if you look at a certain angle in the painting you can actually
see the outline of it,
because he didn't erase it, he left the paint he just covered it with more paint.
I hope that he wouldn't be too embarrassed with us knowing his changes or maybe what
he considered mistakes,
definitely doing it for the sake of research.
Michael: I mean the sky has been challenging because first of all it was very heavily varnished,
not by Rousseau but by restorers in the 40’s and 50’s
So now 65 years later these materials have really discolored and degraded and they are
altering the original colors of the painting so I am removing them to reveal the real Rousseau
palette.
So I’m doing that with this tissue and solvents.
That causes the varnish to be dissolved and safely absorbed into the tissue and peel it
off the surface.
It’s quite gentle because it doesn’t involve rubbing the surface more than necessary
and then the varnish layer comes off onto the tissue.
So removing that really revealed the true colors of the background but it also revealed
some areas that had been heavily over painted.
Once I’ve finished the varnish removal I’ll go back and remove all those old restorations
using a gel material which is
applied to the surface and left on there.
It swells the overpaint and then that’s removed with a brush.
There’s so much to do and not so much time that we’re taking the opportunity to work
side by side
so right now Diana is working on the dress of the gypsy which has some cracks.
Diana: So I’m just using a teeny tiny brush to feed color into areas that are cracked.
You know, you don’t want to miss so you’ve to be pretty precise
because you’re matching the color to look good in the crack not on top of the paint.
Michael: There was some small damages in the body of the lion and in the face of the figure,
so those needed to be restored.
Typically you use a kind of material that is reversible because if you chose the same
materials that the artist used they would
essentially fuse with the surface and you wouldn’t be able to remove them after they’ve
dried,
so that's why we don't use oil on an oil painting.
We might choose a synthetic paint instead because the solvents you need to remove it
will not harm the original oil paint.
We found areas of the sky that were totally white that revealed the priming layer.
So getting to match the, you know, oil paint from 1897 can be challenging.
And particularly blue is difficult to match because it looks different in different lighting
conditions.
Typically in the studio since we have nice diffuse northern light it's even enough so
we get a good color match
but it's also possible in the galleries it could look slightly green or slightly pale,
but we will bring it to the galleries and look at it,
hopefully before its you know actually installed.
The way he thought about how the moon reflects on the figures and
highlights certain things,
that to me is like really magical about this painting.
As we have a different approach these days and than we had in the 50’s,
everything is a little more minimal so the painting won't need to have a whole varnish
removal ever again.
I mean it was really the first time I’d worked extensively on a Rousseau painting
so it was really exciting to see especially the colors in the sky revealed
and the stars start to twinkle as the varnish came off.
It’s a magical environment you could picture yourself in I guess,
as long as you're not afraid of large animals
coming up in the night.