Word: varnished
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Time, helped by the eager brushes of varnishers and retouchers, has altered many a painting so that even its old master wouldn't know it. In 1946, restorers at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum disconcerted art lovers by cleaning up Rembrandt's famous Night Watch,* admired for generations because of its air of midnight mystery. Under decades of dust, soot and varnish was a picture painted in the clear morning light, filled with bright colors and contrasts. Last week The Hague's Mauritshuis displayed another cleaned-up Rembrandt masterpiece: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the Dutch...
When four layers of varnish were removed, drab yellows and blacks turned into delicate white, grey and rose. Hidden architectural details appeared in the background. A hand, repainted twice in the past three centuries, resumed its original form. An anatomical diagram was discovered on the sheet of paper that one man was holding. X-ray photographs revealed more. A face at the top of the group had apparently been painted in after the picture was completed. The refined-looking Dr. Tulp had originally been a coarse-featured Dutchman. Restorers could not uncover the original face, however, for fear of destroying...
...lady in the picture had good looks and a title: Lady Georgiana Gordon. Moreover, she was by the respected hand of 18th Century British Portraitist John Hoppner. But she was in poor condition, her complexion sallowed by a thick coat of yellow varnish. When the Brooklyn Museum got her as a gift in 1934, officials dismissed Lady Georgiana as an inferior Hoppner, sent her to the basement. Recently, Brooklyn assigned Restorer Sheldon Keck to give her a thorough face lifting...
Keck gave the portrait a good going-over with a magnifying glass, then with X-ray photographs. Sure enough, under the pretty features lay another shadowy face. For three months, Keck worked painstakingly with a solvent mixture, cotton swabs and a delicate scalpel, removed the varnish and the top layer of paint. As he worked, a totally different young lady appeared. Writes Keck in the current museum Bulletin: "The mouth was wider and less luscious; the nose was longer and definitely hooked . . . the eyes were smaller and not so soft and liquid. The entire shape of the face was subtly...
...mural is half submerged, the protoplasmic life painted on the floor will waver greenly and the figures along the walls will stand reflected upside down in the pool. To protect his work from the water, Rivera has mixed a plastic called polystyrene with his fresco pigments, plans to varnish the whole with transparent rubber...