The next Sensation event will take place on 3rd January, 2013 and will be a seasonal celebration of the Christmas story with Bridget Crowley describing some paintings. The link is here http://www.wallacecollection.org/collections/event/4759 . Telephone the Wallace on 020 7563 9577 or email community@wallacecollection.org
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24th October, 2012
(http://www.wallacecollection.org/visiting/access)
On this
occasion, we gathered in the front of the entrance lobby and were guided down
to the workshop area by Edwina Mileham and Jocelyn Clarke (Jos). Although the session was from 1pm to 5pm we
are encouraged to bring sandwiches, with the Wallace providing tea, coffee,
chocolate biscuits and shortbread. I had spoken to Edwina prior to the workshop
and learned that we would be mixing paint and that aprons would be provided.
Edwina
briefly introduced The Wallace Collection and the French pictures in the
collection, saying we would be studying two works: a portrait by Elisabeth-Louise Vigee Le Brun
and a portrait by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Edwina
also mentioned that Christoph Vogtherr, Director of the Collection, would be
joining us to discuss art history in relation to the two pictures.
Vigee Le Brun’s
portrait of Madame Perregaux is dated 1789 and has an interesting history, as
does the painter herself. Vigee Le Brun
was the daughter of a painter and married into the art dealer trade, while
keeping a position as a society painter of portraits. She was well in with Marie Antoinette and had
painted her in Vienna. Vigee Le Brun had
studied the techniques of the 17th Century artist Rubens and set out
to paint a portrait with oil on wood rather than the follow the convention of
her time, which was oil on canvas.
The assembly
of a wood panel had been quite a task of carpentry and in the time of Rubens
the workshops of artists would have been full of workers engaged in carpentry,
pigment preparation, manufacture of size, gesso and brushes. All these steps were carried out by
specialists of the time. It was unusual,
therefore, for a painting to be on wood as a cradle of 5 panels had to be
assembled.
The portrayal
of the subject matter was also a bit of an anachronism. Madame Perregaux is painted wearing Spanish costume
of a century earlier, with predominantly black clothing set off with red
highlights in the form of feathers in a hat and ribbons and piping on the
dress. White ruffs accentuate the face,
and the body is framed with a curtain and a balustrade (probably not unlike the
balustrade on the stairway in the Wallace Collection which came from the Banque
de France). The style of dress was
familiar in the Spanish Netherlands or as part of Flemish Art.
Jos described
the painting of Madame Perregaux, She is
portrayed with a three quarter turning to the left of the painting. Her left hand reaches towards curtains while
her right hand holds on to a balustrade.
We had a discussion about the need for Vigee Le Brun to dress Madame
Perregaux in a costume which was clearly of historic interest. Christoph Vogtherr joined us and after
finding where we had got to in the history of the painting, went on to describe
the techniques used of the time.
The Wallace
Collection has had to relocate many of the paintings in the restoration
programme of the Great Hall and we were given examples of how workshops and
artists employed many skills in the production of a painting. I hadn’t appreciated how long it took to make
a painting in terms of allowing the oil to settle rather than dry out. The number of layers in this painting is
quite complex as the brush work involved in the drawing of the feathers and
Madame’s hair is very fine. We wondered
about how often Madame would have actually sat for the painting.
Christoph
then went on to introduce a painting by Greuze of Sophie Arnauld. At first glance, this seemed very out of
style until it was explained that the picture had been a sketch. Artists in the 18th century would
have made several sketches of their subject and it was important to get the
face right in terms of the client’s wishes, with the other items such as the
figure, dress and background being filled in at different times. In the case of the Greuze painting, it had
been bought and finished off years after Greuze. On examination, the additions to this
painting were removed revealing essentially the face of Sophie Arnauld without
the conventional additions of the time.
Christoph
explained that much of the Wallace Collection has documentation regarding the
sale documents and I asked how the Madame Perregaux came into the
collection. It turned out to have been
sold by the family whose fortunes had declined and forced a sale. Much of French art disappeared during the
revolution and emerged in the sale rooms of the 19th century during
the collecting period.
Christoph
also introduced the subject of different types of wood which were used in
paintings. Poplar wood is used in many
Italian Renaissance paintings and in some cases has not aged well with
considerable conservation interventions.
The northern European use of harder woods has made for more robust
pictures, though painting surfaces can become abraded due to wear and tear of
the wood through insect infestation, warping, lack of humidity control and
temperature changes. We were able to ask
questions during Jos’s and Christoph’s explanations, and later in the workshop
as they arose.
We then had
what I usually refer to as a Blue Peter moment where “something I prepared
earlier” is passed round. In this case
it was a velvet hat with red plumes.
With little coaxing, I was able to model the said hat and pose in front
of the picture itself for all to ‘see’.
Professor Whitestick tries on a plumed velvet hat
thinking it was to do with the French Revolution! ;-)
We also
passed round an intricate copy of the ruff worn by Madame Perregaux. This has quite stiff (obviously starched)
cotton with fine lace on the edges.
Workshop
Edwina had
prepared an example of a wooden surface, with the cradle structure showing the
supports for the panels to prevent the warping of the wood through age. (Tennis rackets when made of wood were kept
in a press or frame to prevent warping) The surface of the wood had to be
treated with special materials in order to get a really flat surface. We passed around this cradle and this gave us
a sense of what actually goes on behind the apparent first layer of a picture
that is the wood itself.
Examples of
linen canvas were also passed around and the texture of some of these fabrics
could show through the finished picture without preparation. Linen had to be sized with proprietary size made
of animal bones boiled to make a gelatine or even a basic glue. Samples of
crystallised size were passed around and sniffed; not much of a smell if any
was the consensus.
Jos described
the application of gesso and even gesso grosso (I am afraid two of the Scottish
contingent let the side down with this). Gesso is commonly known as gypsum or
calcium sulphate and is described as whitening though not itself a white
pigment. The use of gesso allows
controlled application of paint rather than have the paint colour bleed into
the wood itself. Jos said that even
today many artists take a lot of time in preparing their working surface long
before the application of any oil paint.
Commercially bought canvases are
often primed in advance.
Next, Edwina
passed round paint in the form of a roll of colours - we were to mix a yellow
ochre oil paint later – from samples she had got for us from L.Cornelissen
& Son. Jos went through a list of
colours and sources which could have been around at the time of the painting by
Vigee Le Brun. These included carmine from cochineal beetle, azurite, ochres or
earths, copper based colours such as malachite, verdigris (a common name for a
green pigment), Rose madder (Alizirin), lamp black, Prussian blue (discovered
in the early 1700s), vermilion (made from mercury or cinnabar), lead and tin
oxides.
There was a
side discussion on the use of cow urine in the preparation of some
colours. This practice continued with a
well-known producer of photographic film keeping a herd of cows for that
purpose. As sizing a canvas involved
applying gesso or animal glue to the empty canvas, often old pieces of
parchment or vellum were boiled up, essentially producing gelatine. At this point, discussion veered into
gelatine production problems on account of mad cow disease and the use of
gelatine in photographic film.
Various
brushes were handed round including some using string to bind the hog bristles
to a wooden handle, and ferrule brushes where the hair is clamped with a metal
ferrule to the handle. We also used a
glass muller to mix pigments in an oil film on a marble surface. Describing a figure of 8, the pigment is
evenly distributed into the linseed oil and can be gathered with a palette
knife or even picked up with a brush. We
had great fun doing this with various consistencies, and using brushes we
painted our own ‘wooden’ panels.
In
conclusion, we thoroughly enjoyed four hours of art history and learned so much
by being in front of the pictures, trying to compare our reproduction with the
original, listening to the description history and techniques of the time and
passing around a model of Madame Perregaux’s hat with the feathers and the
ruff. In the workshop afterwards, we
learned and were able to handle a lot more to do with the actual painting
procedures of the time. In this instance,
the Wallace Collection not only gave an audio description but we had the real
bonus of handling examples of the costume and trying out some of the painting
and processing techniques. This wasn’t
just a case of what the painting is, but a good example of how the painting
works with a bonus of what makes the painting work.
Many thanks
to Christoph, Edwina and Jos for an interesting afternoon.
Professor Whitestick standing outside the Mary Weston Studio
within the Wallace Collection
Postscript
From a 1989 Wallace
catalogue, Vigee Le Brun was said to have been “pleased with the likeness” in
the Madame Perregaux portrait. She was,
however, dissatisfied with female dress of her own time and put all her efforts
into making her paintings a little more ‘pittoresque’. I had mentioned to Edwina about my visit to
the Catherine the Great exhibition in Edinburgh during the summer and as Vigee
Le Brun had spent sometime in St Petersburg, wondered if there was any mention
of her in that catalogue. Sure enough
there was, I discovered when I got home.
There was a painting titled “Daughters of the Emperor Paul I, the Grand
Princesses Alexandra and Elena Pavlovna” dated 1796 (held in the State
Hermitage Museum). However, according to
the exhibition catalogue, Catherine the Great had not been impressed with the
picture of her grandchildren, feeling that they looked like “pug dogs” or
“repulsive little French peasant girls.” (p70)
Catherine ordered that the representation of the girls as “bacchantes”
be removed, so that grapes were replaced with wreaths of flowers and bare arms
were “concealed under their dresses.” As
the catalogue noted, Catherine the Great had rejected the baroque style at the
start of her reign, and later also rejected any form of Sentimentalism and
Romanticism.
Regarding the Greuze painting, the 1989 Wallace Catalogue states that “Cleaned by Lank in 1988 when overpainting in the lower area (summarily indicating the folds of a dress) was removed.”
