So hi, my name is Kristina Mandy, and I'm an  Assistant Conservator here at the National Gallery.

I would like to talk to you today about this

particular painting, which is 'A Vase  of Wild Flowers' by Adolphe Monticelli.

Adolphe Monticelli was a French artist. Most of his  paintings are produced between the 1840s and the

1880s. He was relatively fashionable when he was  painting, and relatively well known. So for example,

he was friends with the young Paul Cézanne, and  they painted together in Marseille. And Vincent

van Gogh actually really admired his paintings, and  he had quite an influence on his technique. So

that's really down to the kinds of paintings  that Monticelli was producing, what he was trying

to do with his paintings. Something that sort  of developed throughout his painting style but

mostly in the 1870s is that it's no longer  really about the subject matter, the paintings

become a bit abstracted, and it's really as  much about the surface texture of the painting

as well as the subject matter. They sort of  have a dual - they're sort of both vying

for your attention. So the flowers in this  painting are nearly to the point of abstraction.

You know, we kind of know they're flowers, but  they're also these lovely mixtures of colours,

applied really boldly onto the painting. Van  Gogh only learned about Monticelli's paintings

in the year of Monticelli's death, so 1886, but  we know that he actually purchased a painting

by Monticelli of flowers, so very very similar  to this one, and that's currently in the Van

Gogh museum in Amsterdam. Montecelli had quite an  influence on artists like Cézanne, and like Van Gogh,

at that time, but he's an artist that fell a bit  out of fashion, and I think that's partly down

to the subject matter of some of his works, you know they aren't the most challenging,

um thrilling, subject matters for paintings, but  it's also down to how those paintings have changed

over time. So quite a lot of the paintings have  these multiple layers of varnish on the surface

that do have this disfiguring effect, and so all  of those goals that Monticelli had, you know, having

you really look at the surface, playing with how  under layers, and so the wooden support is visible,

and the vibrancy of his colours, all of that is sort  of lost when you have these yellowed and cloudy

varnish layers on the surface. It doesn't allow  you to appreciate those factors. And then partly

it's also changing tastes over time, so although  he was fashionable sort of at the period when he

was producing paintings, he sort of quite quickly  fell out of favour. But that can be seen with

other artists as well. So on the flip side, Van Gogh  actually wasn't known at all during his lifetime,

and he only sold one painting before he died.  But now, if you talk to anybody, I think they'd

know who Van Gogh is, so it kind of shows  you how those things can fluctuate. One of the

hopes with this painting is that perhaps when the  treatment is finished, it might hang in the Gallery

perhaps near Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers', which is just  returned from its tour in Japan and Australia,

and so maybe you'll be able to kind of compare for  yourself and see how much Monticelli influenced

Van Gogh. And the difficulty with Monticelli's  paintings is to do with the varnish coatings

on top of the paint having discoloured and  changed and yellowed quite considerably over time,

and so the painting is particularly challenging  because of Monticelli and his use of materials. He

was really quite experimental, so what he liked to  do is mix different materials within his paint

to kind of change their working properties. He also  really liked to leave different underlayers and

areas of the painting visible, and so you can  see areas where the wood is peeking through,

and then he's built it up to areas of thick  impasto, so there's a lot of variation in

surface texture. We did some analysis on  the materials on this particular painting

and in addition to the normal thing you'd expect  with an oil painting, so drying oil and pigments,

we also found a lot of different kinds of  resin, so larch resin, pine resin, Denmark

mastic resins, those materials are kind of mixed  into everything, and so the issue really is that

because he used these resinous materials  and mixed them all into his paints they're

actually very very similar to the materials  on top of the painting, the varnish coatings.

So normally when we would like to clean a painting  and reduce and remove those varnish layers,

we would want to use traditional solvents  that don't affect the paint layers at all,

but in this particular case, because those  resonance materials are mixed into his paints,

it's actually a relatively tricky painting  to clean, and a bit of a challenge. I'm in

the process of reducing those varnish layers and  I've left certain areas to show you, so for example

these flowers are actually the  same flowers, but in this passage

those varnish layers are still present, whereas  here they have been reduced. And for example, these

are the same sort of slightly purpley-blue flowers,  and you can see on particularly cool colours,

the varnish has a really disfiguring effect  because it's sort of impossible to tell what colour

they were meant to be before cleaning because of  the kind of green-yellow nature of the varnish,

and so we've regained the colours but also that  sense of crispness of the paint. You can really see

all the little dabs of his brush to define  all those petals. Another area that I'm in

the process of cleaning is the background.  So for example this is an area that has been

cleaned and this area hasn't, and hopefully  what you can you can tell now is that we've

regained that sense of depth in the painting, so  the background actually recedes behind the bars,

whereas here the varnish has the effect of really  flattening the image and making that really

difficult to see. All of the 12 paintings that the  National Gallery owns by Monticelli were examined

in 2012, so we had a little bit of an understanding  of his materials and techniques then, but in 2018

we decided to have another look at this particular  painting, and see what we could learn,

and one of the opportunities we had recently  was to look at the painting with OCT scanning.

It's a technique used by ophthalmologists or  eye doctors to look at transparent coatings in

the back of your eye, but scientists at Nottingham  Trent university have developed this technique and

combined it with spectral imaging, and they use it  as a way to look at translucent and transparent

coatings on paintings, and so in particular with  this painting, we took a large number of scans,

and the nice thing about OCT scanning is that it's  non-invasive. So normally, when we take a sample

from a painting, it is a physical tiny sample  from a painting, and tells us information about

that one tiny specific location, but OCT scanning  allows you to scan a larger, broader area of the

painting, tells you more information about a bigger  area, and no samples need to be taken. Earlier

in the analysis of this painting, we did take a few  small cross sections, which are little tiny samples

that are taken from a painting, and one of the  ones I want to talk to you about today is a

sample taken from an area of red paint, and  what you can see on this sample is that there

are brown layers above the paint, and below the  paint, and they appear very very similar in colour,

so if you can imagine in areas of this  painting where there isn't much opaque paint,

and where those layers on top are in direct  contact with layers underneath, that's really

really then hard to distinguish between the  two, but the material on top in the cross

section is the varnish layers, and the material  below are the underlayers of the painting.

And what you can see in this cross section is all  the material on top looks as if it's kind of one

coherent layer, but the OCT scanning really  helped us look at these translucent layers

even even further, and on two scans which I'd like  to show you, you can see that actually, rather than

just one thick layer of varnish on top, it's made  up of many thin layers of varnish. So there's one

scan taken from the background of the painting  where actually the paint is relatively flat,

and you can see there are fewer layers here, but  in another scan that was taken from an area of

impasto, so an area of a flower, you can see there  are more layers of varnish on top of the paint, but

also that the lowest layer of varnish has really  pooled into the interstices and the paint texture.

But also it's actually this lowest  layer of varnish that's the one that has

altered, discoloured, and yellowed the most, and  from what we know about Monticelli, although

he initially maybe wanted to enhance certain  areas of the painting by making them more glossy

or changing the texture, that yellowness isn't  something he would have intended for his paintings,

because colour was so so very important to him.  So when I'm working on the painting, I'll use

the imagery from the OCT to remind me about what  varnish layers and what coatings are on top of the

painting, in certain areas of the painting, but it  also really helped inform me about what to expect

in different areas of the painting as well.  So I'm using that imagery, I'm also using

my eyes and my sense of what I'm seeing, also  ultraviolet light is actually really useful

in working on this painting because some of those  varnish layers fluoresce, and so that's another

diagnostic way to kind of look at what I'm doing.  If you'd like to know more about our paintings,

please click here or here. Thank you so  much for watching, and see you next time.