In The National Gallery we have thousands of pictures, this also means that we have
thousands of frames. We’ve got a Framing Department here who work tirelessly to find
the right frames for our pictures and as all of our visitors will know, most of the frames
in the collection include gold.
The carving, the gilding, the making of frames has not changed since the sixteenth century.
We still use the same materials, in gilding, the same bole colours, sometimes aspects of
a frame, sometimes the size, sometimes the back of a frame have to be modified to fit
paintings into the frame.
The more important skill is to make this surface look old.
As a gilder in the Framing Department I come into contact with gold on a daily basis, most
of the collection’s frames are gilded. So what we do is we restore them, we repair them,
we duplicate them and we do so using the same techniques as five hundred years ago.
We use gesso, we use glue, we use putty, we use composition.
Gesso is made out of glue and whiting, and you have various types of gesso and according
to what you need to use it, you will use a different chalk.
It has to be absolutely smooth, it has to look like a porcelain plate, you should not
see any mistakes in there, no brush marks, no dips, it just has to be really beautiful.
Though when you look at antique frames, you sometimes see they’re a bit wobbly, and
we have to replicate the wobble as well. So we use a different Gesso to basically bulk
it up, and to give that sort of wobbly effect that it looks the same as we had before.
Before I do the gilding I have to add some clay colour which helps to adhese the gold,
and I use a yellow all over and on the highlights just a red. The colours help you to adhese
the gold and also bring out the gold colour. If you have a red underneath the gold it has
a deeper colour.
Well the next stage then is the gilding, which is the fun part.
You get your gold leaf, you cut it and then you add a bit of water onto your clay colour
and you put the leaf down with a tip.
The gilder’s tip needs a tiny little bit of grease, and usually you have some right here
or on your cheek just a little bit so the gold will stick on your tip to transport it
over to the frame and then with a bit of water I put it down.
So once the gold has flattened and dried, about four hours later, you can start burnishing
with an agate stone and you can really make the gold come alive. It’s just magnificent.
Jan Van Eyck’s 'Portrait of a Man' with a turban has a particularly well preserved frame,
it’s almost miraculous in its state of preservation. It’s got original gilding and original writing
on top of this frame, that’s possibly why it was so well looked after, so people knew
that this frame was precious.
Well, I love this tondo, which means a circular painting. I like the shape and also I like
the way the frame is applied onto the flat surface.
So you’ve got the carved wood, the rope that goes around it, then you’ve got the
pressed pastiglia, then you’ve got the dripped pastiglia, and also here you can see little
imperfections when you look at this pattern here, you can just see where the gilder ended
it up, it just didn’t quite fit so he had to cut half of the flower off.
On the flat surface what they did is making little dropped gesso, pastiglia that’s slightly
raised and also you see the little imperfection on the halo, because there’s nothing worse
than making a circle. When you punch a circle, sometimes you get disturbed and you see
a little slip here and there, and I love it because you can see the man made work here.
I can relate to everything they’re going through, and tondos, I love them but they’re
a challenge.
So here we are in front of Sebastiano del Piombo’s 'Raising of Lazarus', a very important
picture in the Gallery. It’s one of the largest pictures we have and it was part of
the foundational collection of The National Gallery in 1824 when it was given the inventory
number NG1. It is a painting that is difficult and very dense, and very large, and it has
a new frame.
What was the starting point for making this frame, is that the predella, the bottom part
of this frame, has survived in Narbonne, in the Cathedral where this painting was painted
for originally.
So we knew exactly what a quarter of the original frame would have looked like.
By chance we acquired the top of an enormous altarpiece at an auction in Italy and that,
combined with the knowledge about the predella, made us think about making a frame for such
a big painting.
So it consists of, extraordinarily, a recreation of the bottom part of the original frame and
parts that all point back to the sixteenth century.
Yes, and they’re all antique frames, they all have the same reference point of antique
architecture.
I wondered a little bit about the gilding.
There’s quite a lot of gold and one challenge of course is to tone it down to, in this case
we had original early sixteenth century pieces.
The toning of the gold is a very skilled process
of making gold look as if it is five hundred years old.
It’s certainly brought out the painting in the room.
People who come into the room take photographs of this painting in this frame just because
it’s such a surprising sight.
It’s really brought to the fore the qualities of this complex and dense painting, and it
reminds us that it's a great masterpiece of the time.