It's quite a special painting because it was painted for his own pleasure.
Everything you see here is him. It is wholly autograph.
It's really exciting to see these details emerging.
Hello, my name is Larry Keith, I'm Head of Conservation and Keeper at the National Gallery
and I'm here to talk to you today about the restoration of Rubens's late, great landscape
'The Chateau Het Steen'. What we're doing now is cleaning the painting and that is to say we're
taking off the varnish coating supplied long after Rubens finished painting the work We think the
varnishes that we're taking off now are mostly around 75 years old, some a little bit older due
to partial cleanings in the past. Nonetheless you can see these varnishes that come off because
they're yellow - they were applied clear and they've degraded and become
quite yellow. This is mostly down to ultraviolet light acting on the varnish films. Happily now we
don't have any ultraviolet light in the Gallery so the varnishes we apply we are pretty confident
will not degrade so rapidly. Nonetheless these yellow varnishes destroyed all the
colour relationships and you can see as they come off how changed the landscape is and how you can
understand Rubens's amazing juxtaposition of yellow sunlight and yellow light hitting the
white clouds and the way he's using cool blues to lead you back into the landscape and so I think
taking off the varnish here is quite revelatory, allowing you to see an artist really working
for himself at the peak of his powers in a completely free and personal way.
We take off the varnishes using various combinations of organic solvents that are designed
to work on the varnish alone and not affect the paint at all. Typically we have different ones we
use and we can manipulate what kind of mixtures we use depending on what we're trying to achieve, what
kind of combinations of varnishes we may be faced with, whether they behave differently. This one
is a rather straightforward cleaning and so the varnish solvents we use are utterly conventional.
Well, as you can see, I'm rolling a bit of my solvent mixture on the varnish. You see it's
starting to come. I may go back and tease out some remnants of softened varnish that's settled in the
hollows of Rubens's exuberant impasto
and already look - here's some more or less pure white juxtaposed with the yellow
a distinction that, as you see up here, it was completely illegible beneath the varnish.
What you see now is the picture with most of the yellow varnish
reduced or removed. Starting in the left, I'm moving across to the right and you can see
there's level of difference here. The painting, at various times, had different treatments
different kinds of toned varnishes as well. We've got evidence of the picture having had
selective coloured varnishes applied. It's really interesting to think about the history of taste
and what that means at different times, this kind of vibrant, exuberant use of local colour
and the key difference between cool and warm was something that I think was deliberately suppressed
in a wish to have a lovely overall golden glow and tonal unity which I feel is, you know, just not
letting Rubens be Rubens but anyway we're looking into that as we go across but the cleaning of the
picture in this case is doing that and as I remove the varnish I'm encountering some old
retouchings from various campaigns of restoration covering old damages, many of which have
discoloured themselves, the retouching, so they're coming off as well before I do my own restoration.
So here we have got a network of losses where the panel's been compressed or an old split here
with a retouching going across so that's part of cleaning as well is removing old restorations
where they're not useful and clearing the way for doing them now with more stable materials.
A few things I think are really interesting also to think about is just how free the handling is.
Now I guess Rubens is almost a byword for a very efficient artist running a business with a very
fixed habit of delegation and collaboration in the studio but this picture stands outside that.
This is a panel painting he made shortly after he purchased the property you see in the left,
The chateau Het Steen which he used as his country retreat and mansion in the last years of his life.
It's quite a special painting because it seems pretty clear it was painted for his own pleasure
to decorate the house you see in the painting and everything you see here is him - it is wholly
autograph at a level of finish that wasn't about clients. It was what he wanted the picture to look
like and so from that point of view it's really exciting to see these details emerging like
these bits of pure white deployed to suggest the bubbling of the brook as
it turns the corner and comes down across here. It's something almost like, well obviously, very
influential to someone like Constable but you can see the similarities and the freedom of movement
with the brush and the juxtaposition of very fine, quick painting and very rough brushstrokes,
the way he uses very strong impasto to suggest recession and also things poking out from through
the foliage, it's really bold colour and bold brush work and again it's something I think we
can appreciate much, much more as a result of the cleaning and I think it's useful to think about
the implications of removing that yellow varnish - it's not just that it's less yellow but what it
does for our reading of the picture itself. This is an exciting painting in terms of their handling,
Rubens's handling of paint, but it's still working in a kind of older flemish tradition of the kind
of bird's eye view in the distant landscape, moving back with aerial perspective of blue
so the whole juxtaposition of the warm russet tones of the late summer, early autumn landscape in
the foreground and as the recession goes back and back and back, the colours get cooler and cooler
and so you can see how the yellow varnish has been suppressing that skillful deployment of the warm
and cool tones and furthermore it is meant to be morning. You see they're going off to market,
there's a hunter with the lurcher going after some grouse or partridges, quail, I'm not sure,
in the foreground but the sun is just here, very low in the sky and you can see it's actually
below some of the clouds and it's a strong raking light casting a very yellow warm light on the
sides of the trees and there are these yellow and orange highlights in the sky, juxtaposed with the
white and, of course, that's very hard to see here because of the distortion of the yellow varnish
which, to be fair, I haven't cleaned down here either. The yellow varnish is not as distorting
of the colour relationships and the warmer tones, these golden warm browns and reds and oranges,
but when it's over the the cooler tones it really does change our reading of the picture and that's
something that really fundamentally alters what we can understand of Rubens's intent and so it's
been rather thrilling, really, to see the landscape literally open up as a result of the cleaning.
It even makes clearer how he's constructed this extraordinary receding diagonal and you get a
real sense when you look at it slightly obliquely of a moving back and how the whole composition is
constructed to do that. It's very, very dramatic and really, really stimulating to think about
if this is something that's based on how it was hung originally, whether there's a strong
case for the idea of it being seen from the side perhaps, even with the real light source mimicking
the placement of the sun in the picture but, in any case, I think it's very clear that, as we've
removed the yellow varnish, this recession is really, really dramatic and very effective.
Now that the varnish has been removed, the cleaning finished and overpaints
removed as well as old restorations, we're ready to do the structural treatment
of this amazing, interesting and complex panel - a treatment I'll be doing
with Britta New, our Specialist Panel Expert, in Lower Conservation.