The Art of Conservation II: Sir Charles Eastlake and conservation at the National Gallery, London

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:19 Page 1

The Art of Conservation II: Sir Charles Eastlake and conservation at the National Gallery, London

by SUSANNA AVERY-QUASH

WITH THE GIFT

of his collection to the newly inaugurated National Gallery, the art patron and amateur landscape artist Sir George Beaumont declared in May 1826: ‘For my own part I sincerely wish every genuine and pure picture by the classics of the art were destined to be placed in this asylum. For had not this institution taken place I am satisfied that in less than another century not one of the works of the celebrated masters would have remained in an uninjured state’.1 William Seguier (1772– 1843),2 an art agent, adviser and restorer, had been appointed first Keeper of the Gallery at its foundation in 1824, with responsibility to care for the pictures and make them accessible to the public. He had restricted ‘care’ to washing and varnishing the pictures; there is ‘no record of any pictures having been cleaned’.3 Yet two decades later, in 1846, the first major cleaning controversy erupted at the Gallery with accusations of negligence against its administration for allowing what was perceived to be poor quality cleaning of pictures.4 Controversies about the treatment of paintings, although not unheard of in Europe from the sixteenth century5 (witness those surrounding the Louvre in the eighteenth century),6 were a new phenomenon in Britain, where public art galleries and a critically engaged public had emerged only in the early decades of the nineteenth century.7 During the mid-nineteenth century the National Gallery would become a focus for significant debates about the techniques and conservation of Renaissance paintings.8 A major protagonist in the 1846 controversy was Sir Charles Eastlake (1793–1865; Fig.36), then Keeper at the National

Gallery, who had succeeded Seguier late in 1843. As an artist, art historian and connoisseur, he realised in a way that many others did not that the original surfaces of most newly acquired oldmaster pictures were often obscured with layers of yellowed and soiled varnish and overpainting by previous restorers. This was quickly exacerbated by dirt from the London atmosphere which deposited a ‘thick film, alike foreign in feature and in colour to the original character of the picture, detracting from its highest qualities, and depriving it for the time of clearness and brilliancy’.9 Eastlake was aware that removing such encrustations would allow the pictures to be scrutinised in a cleaner state and thus enable more accurate attributions to be made.10 Yet this attitude led him into conflict with influential individuals in the art world who still preferred paintings with a warmly toned appearance. Beaumont, as ‘the leader of taste’,11 had promoted the ‘Brown Mania’ and is supposed to have quipped: ‘A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown’.12 Eastlake was knowledgeable about the old masters’ methods and materials and about historical documents on the practice of oil painting13 – he published his pioneering Materials for a History of Oil Painting in 1847. In August 1844 he gained the Trustees’ approval to initiate a programme of cleaning, focusing on those paintings which in his opinion needed it,14 the earliest serious attempt to clean pictures in the Gallery’s collection. As ‘competent persons’ to undertake the work, he chose John Seguier, the younger brother of William, and Thomas Boden Brown. Eastlake superintended their work closely and even intervened in certain cases.15

I would like to thank Jill Dunkerton, Larry Keith and Marika Spring from the National Gallery, Joyce Hill Stoner and Ian McClure, and especially Hero Lotti (née Boothroyd Brooks) and Matthew Hayes for providing useful criticism and information on a draft of this article. I am also indebted to the National Gallery’s Archivist Richard Wragg for assistance with finding relevant source material, and to Denise King in the Gallery’s Photographic Department for facilitating new photography for this article which was expertly undertaken by Maria Conroy. I remain grateful, as ever, to James Carleton Paget for editorial assistance.

1 Letter from G.H. Beaumont to J. Taylor, 26th May 1826; quoted in W.T. Whitley: Art in England 1821–1837, London 1930, p.106.

2 See ‘The Late Mr. William Seguier’, The Times (14th November 1843), p.3; A. Laing: ‘William Seguier and advice to picture collectors’, in C. Sitwell and S. Staniforth, eds.: Studies in the History of Painting Restoration, London 1998, pp.97–120; and C. Saumarez Smith: The National Gallery: A Short History, London 2009, pp.31–54.

3 Report from the Select Committee on the National Gallery; together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, London 1853, p.viii. The Select Committee of 1853 was set up ‘to inquire into the management of the National Gallery’ and ‘to consider in what mode the collective monuments of antiquity and fine art possessed by the nation may be most securely preserved, judiciously augmented, and advantageously exhibited to the Public’.

4 P. Hendy: exh. cat. An Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures (1936–1947), London (National Gallery) 1947, pp.ix and xii–xiv; and N.S. Brommelle: ‘Controversy in 1846’, Museums Journal 56 (February 1957), pp.257–62.

5 See Sitwell and Staniforth, op. cit. (note 2), passim.

6 See A. McClellan: Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern

Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne 1994, pp.104–06 and 131–33.

7 See J. Anderson: ‘The first cleaning controversy at the National Gallery 1846– 1853’, in P. Booth et al., eds: Appearance, Opinion, Change: Evaluating the Look of Paintings, London 1990, p.3.

8 An attempt to show the extent to which the debates about conservation in the Gallery during this period contributed to a wider debate about the subject in Great Britain and beyond would require another study.

9 C.L. Eastlake, M. Faraday and W.S. Russell: ‘Report of the Commission appointed to inquire into the state of the Pictures in the National Gallery’, 24th May 1850, reprinted as Appendix A in Report from the Select Committee on the National Gallery: together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, London 1850, p.68. The Select Committee of 1850 was established ‘to consider the present accommodation afforded by the National Gallery, and the best mode of preserving and exhibiting to the public, the works of art given to the nation or purchased by parliamentary grants’.

10 For instance, Eastlake revised his opinion of Lorenzo Lotto’s The Physician Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his son, Niccolò (NG699) after restoration: before it was cleaned he regarded it as ‘heavy and opaque and on the whole ineligible’ for purchase by the nation, but after Giuseppe Molteni had removed varnish and repaint, he quickly bought it; see J. Anderson: ‘Layard and Morelli’, in F.M. Fales and B.J. Hickey, eds: Austen Henry Layard tra l’oriente e Venezia (symposium internazionale, Venezia 26– 28 ottobre 1983), Venice 1987, pp.123–24.

11 C.R. Leslie on Beaumont; quoted in F. Owen and D. Blayney Brown: Collector of Genius: A Life of Sir George Beaumont, New Haven and London 1988, p.1.

846

d e c ember 2015

•

clvi1

•

the burlington magazine

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:19 Page 2

SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE

The cleaning of four of the Gallery’s pictures – Rubens’s Minerva protects Pax from Mars, Cuyp’s A hilly landscape with figures, Velázquez’s Philip IV hunting wild boar and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne – in the vacation period of 1846 caused an unprecedented public reaction.16 A letter appeared in The Times, on 29th October 1846, signed by ‘Verax’, the pseudonym of John Morris Moore, an unsuccessful painter turned art dealer, who became the most venomous critic of the Gallery’s cleaning and acquisition policies. Eastlake was blamed both for ‘flaying’ and ‘scraping raw’ the pictures, and overpainting (‘falsifying’) them – permanently damaging priceless, publicly owned pictures.17 Other voices joined the debate, including John Ruskin, whose verdict was more moderate.18 Eastlake wrote a report in defence of his picture cleaning for the Trustees in January 1847, and distinguished artists such as Edwin Landseer and William Etty wrote letters in his support, which led the Trustees to publicly vindicate their Keeper’s actions. Nonetheless, in November that year, Eastlake resigned, explaining that the office took up too much of his time. The consequence was that he was never again willing to be as publicly open about the cleaning procedures he sanctioned, once he became a Trustee in November 1850, and later Director.

Eastlake’s more cautious attitude may be traced in a second cleaning controversy at the National Gallery, which blew up in 1852. Nine pictures had been cleaned in the autumn recess,19 and Morris Moore once again initiated a heated debate, claiming in The Times that glazing on the pictures’ original surfaces had been removed (Eastlake adamantly denied this); that the pictures had been cleaned unevenly (Eastlake thought this would rectify itself);20 and that the operation had been over-hastily executed.

Morris Moore held Eastlake and Thomas Uwins, the new Keeper,21 chiefly responsible for the proceedings at the Gallery.22 However, Eastlake had shown more caution than any other Trustee over the terms of John Seguier’s employment as picture cleaner. Indeed he put it on record that, in spite of what had been said in Parliament and the newspapers about him being ‘the sole advocate for cleaning’, he had been ‘utterly against it’.23 He explained his circumspection as follows: ‘the cleaning of pictures is a subject which admits of no proof, and it is one on which the public mind may be easily unsettled’.24 12 Quoted in R. and S. Redgrave: A Century of Painters of the English School, London 1866, I, p.11.

13 As early as 1830 Eastlake had transcribed historical recipes of varnishes, pigments and how to clean pictures in his notebooks; see S. Avery-Quash, ed.: ‘The travel notebooks of Sir Charles Eastlake’, The Walpole Society 73 (2011), I, pp.100–02; the original notebooks are preserved in the National Gallery archive (cited hereafter as NGA), NG22.

In relation to his work from 1841 for the Fine Arts Commission, Eastlake was ‘the first to conduct a systematic search for documents on the practice of oil painting at the Record Office and the British Museum’; see U. Kern: ‘Theodore de Mayerne, the King’s black paintings and seventeenth-century methods of restoring and conserving paintings’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 157 (2015), p.701 and note 8. Eastlake’s private art library contained several important texts on picture cleaning and restoration, including Christian Köster’s early treatise. For a transcript of the catalogue of Eastlake’s library, see http://www.memofonte.it/home/files/pdf/EASTLAKE_S_LIBRARY.pdf.

14 NGA, NG1/1, Minutes of the Board of Trustees, 5th August 1844, p.265 and 24th August 1846, p.312.

15 In 1844, after Boden Brown had cleaned Rubens’s Judgment of Paris (NG194), Eastlake painted in a loss on Juno’s back; the matter was discussed in Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3): Minutes of Evidence: T.B. Brown, 1090–96, and Eastlake, 4524–36. Eastlake also did some retouching on the figure of Susannah in Guido Reni’s Susannah and the elders (NG196).

16 The paintings’ gallery numbers are Rubens (NG46), Cuyp (NG53), Velázquez (NG197) and Titian (NG35).

17 See Morris Moore’s letter to The Times of 10th December 1846, reprinted in Verax: The Abuses of the National Gallery, London 1847, p.16. This pamphlet contains

36. Sir Charles Eastlake, by Francis Grant. 1853. Pen, ink and wash on paper, 29.3 by 20.3 cm. (National Gallery, London).

After these two controversies, the debate about how the Gallery might best fulfil its obligation to exhibit pictures in good condition shifted. There was now a greater emphasis on what today would be called ‘preventative conservation’. In 1853, in all of Morris Moore’s letters of complaint, which had been published in The Times between 1846 and 1847.

18 Ruskin agreed that National Gallery pictures needed cleaning but called for more caution in the future; see his letter to The Times of 7th January 1847, reprinted in Verax, op. cit. (note 17), pp.44–45.

19 The pictures most discussed in the 1852 cleaning controversy were two Canalettos: The stonemason’s yard (NG127), and Venice: The Grand Canal with San Simeone Piccolo (NG163); three works by Claude: Seaport with the embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (NG14), The mill (NG12), and Landscape with Hagar and the angel (NG61); Veronese’s The consecration of St Nicholas (NG26); and the early copy after Poussin’s The plague at Ashdod (NG165). For a modern assessment of Seguier’s cleaning of the Claudes, see M. Wyld, J. Mills and J. Plesters: ‘Some observations on blanching (with special reference to the paintings of Claude)’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 4 (1980), p.58.

20 Eastlake more than once expressed his opinion that, where the picture surface had been ‘unequally cleaned’, time would ‘rectify it’, once the ‘lights [. . . were] soiled’.

See Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3): Minutes of Evidence: Eastlake, 4594, 4711, 4714; and Brommelle, op. cit. (note 4), p.262.

21 See Saumarez Smith, op. cit. (note 2), pp.61–66; and H. Ruhemann: The Cleaning of Paintings: Problems and Potentialities, London 1968, pp.332–34.

22 See J. Morris Moore: Revival of Vandalism at the National Gallery; A Reply to Messrs.

Ruskin, Heaphy, and Wornum’s Letters, in The Times, London 1853, passim.

23 Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3): Minutes of Evidence: Eastlake, 4576; see also Anderson, op. cit. (note 7), p.5.

24 Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3): Minutes of Evidence: Eastlake, 4557. the burlington mag a z i n e

•

clvi1

•

december 2015

847

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:19 Page 3

SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE

response to the second cleaning controversy, a Select Committee was appointed, one of whose principal lines of enquiry was ‘the management of the Gallery, as especially connected with picture cleaning’. The need for better record keeping also emerged.

These concerns were reflected in the commissioners’ report, which recommended that picture cleaners employed by the Gallery were in future to give a full explanation of their proposed materials and procedure; that any pictures to be cleaned were to be the subject of a written report from the Director to the Trustees; and that, if necessary, paintings were to be examined early on in the process by three experienced people, including a chemist.25 Although not all these measures were put into practice, it is noteworthy that they had become established concerns at this time.

In 1855, on the back of the recommendations of the 1853 Select Committee, which had led to the reconstitution of the National Gallery, Eastlake was appointed the Gallery’s first Director. The 1856 Annual Report stated that ‘The Treasury Minute [of March 1855] contained no specific directions relating to the conservation of the pictures in the collection’, but it was noted that one of the ‘chief duties’ of the new role of Director – apart from acquisitions and display – was the ‘description, and conservation of the collection’.26 Eastlake continued along a cautious, scientifically led approach in London. However, his desire to show pictures in a good state of preservation, and with a harmonious appearance, led him to arrange for some new acquisitions to be restored in Italy before they were shipped to London and put on public display.27 Clearly this arrangement was adopted to lessen the chance of further public outcry and parliamentary inquiry,28 although Eastlake’s official line, as reported to the Trustees on 14th November 1857, was that England lacked specialists with the requisite expertise to restore early Italian pictures well.

Eastlake made use of several restorers abroad including the Florentine Ugo Baldi,29 who was employed from 1855 to 1856.30 However, Eastlake was not entirely satisfied with his work and his employment was discontinued. The Italian restorer most often employed was Giuseppe Molteni (1800–67),31 a painter and conservator at the Brera Gallery in Milan (and its Director

from 1861 until his death), who worked on eight of the Gallery’s newly purchased pictures.32 Molteni also worked for other public institutions including the Reale Pinacoteca, Turin, as well as for private individuals: Count Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli of Milan; Eastlake himself; Otto Mündler, the Gallery’s Travelling Agent; and Austen Henry Layard, later a Gallery Trustee, some of whose pictures eventually became part of the National Gallery’s collection.33 In Milan, Eastlake is said to have permitted restorers to take ‘previously unconsidered liberties in stripping away old varnish and previous restorers’ repaints’. In order to make a ‘new acquisition harmonise with the appearance of those in the collection at home’, they would often then be ‘re-submerged under a veil of patina’, in this case a toned varnish.34 Molteni’s repair of local damages in Garofalo’s Madonna and Child enthroned with saints and Verrocchio’s Virgin and Child with two angels are characteristic examples of his labour.

25 Eastlake, in one of his witness statements at the 1853 Select Committee, expressed his opinion that chemists should be consulted, and even paid, but that it would ‘complicate the machinery very much’ if the Government decided to follow the Committee’s suggestion to ‘appoint chemists to consider how solvent and chemical applications act upon pictures’; quoted in N.S. Brommelle: ‘Material for a history of conservation: The 1850 and 1853 reports on the National Gallery’, Studies in Conservation 2 (1956), p.185. Eastlake had brought up the topic as early as 1845. See C.L. Eastlake: Observations on the Unfitness of the Present Building for its Purpose in a letter to the Right Hon. Sir Robert Peel, Bart., London 1845, p.18, where he noted: ‘An experienced investigator, in turning his attention to the preservation of works of art might, in the course of such inquiries, and with opportunities of examining the grounds, materials, &c., of old pictures, be enabled to throw considerable light on the practice of painting in its best ages, and to impart useful information to artists. It occurs to me that the able chemists, who preside over the Geological Museum at Craig’s Court, would, on many accounts [. . .] be eligible for the purpose in question’.

26 Copy of a Treasury Minute, dated the 27th day of March 1855, Re-constituting the Establishment of the National Gallery, p.4. When the National Gallery was founded it was not clear who held responsibility for picture cleaning. The Minute of 23rd March 1824 noted that the Keeper should ‘attend to the care and preservation of the pictures’, but a subsequent Minute of 2nd July stipulated that a ‘Committee of six gentlemen’ (the first Trustees) was ‘to give such directions [. . .] for the proper conservation of [the pictures], to the Keeper’. Even when the Gallery was reconstituted the matter was not resolved. See Report of the Director of the National Gallery for 1856 (NGA, NG17/2) (hereafter such reports will be cited as Annual Report followed by the year in brackets), p.14: ‘The Treasury Minute before referred to contains no specific directions with regard to the conservation of the pictures in the collection, but the opinions and

recommendations on that subject in the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the National Gallery in 1853, may, it is conceived, be generally consulted with advantage by the Director’.

27 For Eastlake’s view that once a painting had been put on display further restoration work was very difficult to manage, see a characteristic letter from Eastlake to Wornum, 14th September 1859 (NGA, NGA02/3/3/65). Thanks to Matthew Hayes for drawing my attention to this letter.

28 For Lord Elcho’s criticism of Eastlake’s practice of getting pictures restored in Italy, see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates: Third Series, London 1857–58, p.151, cols.1379–91.

29 For more on Baldi as a restorer, see G. Incerpi: Semplici e continue diligenze: Conservazione e restauro dei dipinti nelle gallerie fiorentine nel settecento e nell’ottocento, Florence 2011, esp. pp.179 and 204.

30 Annual Report (1856), pp.24–25 recorded that Baldi had repaired injured portions in both Botticini’s S. Gerolamo altarpiece (NG227.1–2) and Benozzo Gozzoli’s Virgin and Child enthroned among angels and saints (NG283), and had removed varnish from the Virgin and Child with St John and two angels from the workshop of Botticelli (NG226). In 1857 the Gallery purchased twenty-two early Italian pictures from Baldi and his business partner, Francesco Lombardi.

31 For more on Molteni as a restorer, see G. Bonsanti: ‘Raphael’s “Marriage of the Virgin” in Milan and the restoration by Giuseppe Molteni (1858)’, in I. Brajer, ed.: Conservation in the Nineteenth Century, London 2013, pp.29–34; and J. Dunkerton: ‘Gusto, stile e tecnica in due restauri di Giuseppe Molteni’, in exh. cat. Giuseppe Molteni (1800–1867) e il ritratto nella Milano romantica: pittura, collezionismo, restauro, tutela, Milan (Museo Poldi Pezzoli) 2000, pp.77–83.

32 Molteni worked on the Virgin and Child with two angels by Verrocchio and assistant (NG296); Romanino’s high altarpiece for S. Alessandro, Brescia (NG297);

848

d e c ember 2015

•

clvi1

•

the burlington magazine

37. A gallery in the Barry Rooms complex showing National Gallery pictures protected by glass before being put on display. 1876.

Photograph.

(National Gallery, London).

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:19 Page 4

SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE

According to the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, Molteni, with Eastlake’s blessing, sometimes went further and ‘improved’ certain pictures. ‘But because he is a pupil of our Academies’, noted Morelli, ‘he occasionally takes part, just as your excellent Director of the National Gallery often does, in the battle the Academies wage to correct the naïve inaccuracies of the Old Masters’.35 An example of this is Pisanello’s Virgin and Child with Sts George and Anthony Abbot (NG776) which was heavily restored, notably in the sky and the figure of St George, before it was acquired by the Gallery. A number of times Eastlake noted in his travel diaries changes that he would like to have made to the composition of certain paintings,36 but he put such thinking into practice only occasionally. Documented cases of more radical restoration include Molteni’s changing the shape and colour of the cloaks of the disciples and feet of the one on the right in Altobello Melone’s The road to Emmaus and his removal of the ox and its repainting elsewhere in Romanino’s Nativity.37 Such interventions, which today would be considered unethical, were then widely practised. However, Molteni adhered to the modern practice of reversibility and his varnish and retouchings are mostly readily resoluble.38 At Trafalgar Square there was a clear awareness that paintings were affected by their environment and a consequent desire to try to control it to minimise its effect on pictures.39 The commissioners of the 1853 Select Committee captured the most upto-date thinking about the benefits of equitable temperature and humidity, good ventilation, clean air and keeping pictures away from the harmful effect of direct sunlight.40 Yet there was a limit to what could be achieved at the National Gallery, given its polluted location on Trafalgar Square, a result of the smoke emitted from ‘several large chimneys, particularly that of the Baths and Washhouses, and that connected with the steamengine by which the fountains in Trafalgar-square are worked’ and from the steamboats that operated at the Hungerford Stairs nearby, as well as the dust and ‘impurity produced within the building, arising from the respiration and perspiration’ of the vast crowds of visitors.41 Ultimately, it was decided not to move the Gallery from the heart of the metropolis to the cleaner suburbs, a matter endlessly

discussed in various Select Committees, notably those of 1850 and 1853 (for instance, Prince Albert only abandoned his plan for a ‘Pinakothek’ at Kensington Gore in 1856). In response to this debate Eastlake offered suggestions for the better conservation of the pictures at Trafalgar Square. Simultaneously, regulations were issued for public behaviour (such as no touching of the pictures, no stepping beyond rails, no smoking and no admittance of food, umbrellas and sticks)42 and systematic ‘housekeeping’ began (including daily sweeping to keep down dust and frequent checks that the blinds excluding the sun’s rays were in good repair).43 Eastlake believed that air conditioning had real potential. In a letter of 1845 addressed to Sir Robert Peel he expressed concerns about the current building and brought up the experiments into air-conditioning (including filtering the air) of a Dr Reid, who had installed apparatus at the Houses of Parliament as early as 1836. In 1850 Eastlake claimed that the present site of the Gallery was tenable only if the paintings could be protected by means such as those advocated by Reid,44 but his advice was not heeded and air conditioning was installed only in the twentieth century.

Among Eastlake’s earliest suggestions for conservation was the covering of the pictures with glass, a suggestion that he, the scientist Michael Faraday and the painter William Russell promoted in their Report [. . .] to inquire into the state of the Pictures in the National Gallery of 24th May 1850. As a result of their own experiments (and the answers to a questionnaire on the subject sent to various European public galleries),45 they concluded that glass helped to conserve paintings and that there were no ill effects resulting from excluding air from the surface of paintings, while potentially damaging fluctuations in temperature tended to be minimised by glazing, and that although the heat of direct sunlight on a picture surface was increased by glass, such exposure could easily be avoided by the use of blinds. The only perceived disadvantage was that glass rendered pictures less visible – ‘a great evil’ in Eastlake’s view. Consequently, as Director, Eastlake put glass in front of as many pictures as possible (Fig.37), and Ralph Nicholson Wornum, the Keeper (Fig.38), was employed to design frames to accommodate huge panes. By 1891, Frederic Burton, the third Director, could state that ‘the glazing of the whole collection is now virtually complete’.46

Bergognone’s Virgin and Child with saints (NG298); Garofalo’s The Madonna and Child enthroned with saints (NG671); Solario’s Giovanni Cristoforo Longoni (NG734); Gerolamo dai Libri’s The Virgin and Child with St Anne (NG748); Antonio da Vendri’s The Giusti family of Verona(?) (NG749); and Altobello Melone’s The road to Emmaus (NG753).

33 For works formerly in the Eastlake collection cleaned by Molteni before they entered the National Gallery, see J. Dunkerton: ‘L’état de restauration des deux Pisanello de la National Gallery de Londres’, Pisanello (actes du colloque, musée du Louvre, 26–28 juin 1996), Paris 1998, pp.657–81; and idem: ‘Cosimo Tura as painter and draughtsman: The cleaning and examination of his “Saint Jerome”’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 15 (1994), pp.42–53. For works formerly in the Layard collection restored by Molteni, idem: ‘The technique and restoration of Bramantino’s “Adoration of the Kings”’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 14 (1993), pp.42–61; idem, A. Roy and A. Smith: ‘The unmasking of Tura’s “Allegorical Figure”: A painting and its concealed image’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 11 (1987), pp.5–35; and for other works including Andrea Busati’s Entombment and Moroni’s Portrait of a man, both of which Molteni extensively overpainted, see Anderson, op. cit. (note 10), pp.111, 114 and 115.

34 Anderson, op. cit. (note 7), p.6.

35 Quoted in idem, op. cit. (note 10), p.116.

36 See Avery-Quash, op. cit. (note 13), I, pp.19–20.

37 See C. Gould: ‘Eastlake and Molteni: The ethics of restoration’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 116 (1974), pp.530–34. Gould notes (p.533) in the case of the Melone painting, ‘Eastlake must have given Molteni some degree of instruction about what to do, but did not live to see the outcome’. See also N. Penny: National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, I, Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona, London 2004, I, pp.320–23.

38 See Dunkerton 1994, op. cit. (note 33), p.44; and Dunkerton, Roy and Smith, op. cit. (note 33), p.14.

39 For a clear summary of the various aspects of Eastlake’s work at the Gallery in relation to the environment, see H. Boothroyd Brooks: ‘Environmental conditions in relation to easel-painting conservation in the second half of the 19th century at the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, London’, in A. Oddy and S. Smith, eds.: Past Practice – Future Prospects (The British Museum Occasional Paper Number 145), London 2001, pp.19–23.

40 See D. Saunders: ‘Pollution and the National Gallery’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 21 (2000), pp.77–94.

41 Select Committee (1850), op. cit. (note 9), p.iv; and J. Conlin: The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery, London 2009, pp.78–80.

42 For a complete list of regulations, see ‘Ordinary Duties of Curators’ in Annual Report (1856), pp.22–23.

43 NGA, NGA2/3/2/13: Wornum’s Diary (cited hereafter as Wornum’s Diary), contains countless entries concerning matters to do with the building’s safety, cleanliness and ventilation, e.g., 3rd January 1856: ‘Mats and scrapers placed under the Portico’; 22nd October 1856: ‘Blinds thoroughly repaired’; 30th September 1857: ‘Hall dusted by men sent from the office of works’.

44 See Select Committee (1850), op. cit. (note 9): Minutes of Evidence: Eastlake, 371– 382; and also Eastlake, op. cit. (note 25), pp.20–21.

45 The replies from the international survey arrived too late for inclusion in the Commissioners’ original report so they were published in November 1850 as a Further Report on the Subject of the Protection of the Pictures in the National Gallery by Glass.

46 Annual Report (1891), p.6. The Report of 1894 was the last to supply information on this topic.

the burlington mag a z i n e

•

clvi1

•

december 2015

849

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:19 Page 5

SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE

In 1850 Faraday ran further experiments to ‘ascertain whether the ordinary varnish [was] a protection or not’ for picture surfaces which were reported to the Select Committee.47 He exposed a new canvas, covered with white lead paint and protected with various thicknesses of mastic resin varnish, to hydrogen sulphide gas for a two-month period to recreate the effect of polluted air on paint. It was discovered that the mastic had protected the paint completely except in areas where there were cracks.48 Mastic was popular not only because it could preserve the paint surface from dirt but also because it was held to add lustre to the colours, darkened comparatively slowly and was relatively easy to remove using either friction (old varnish can become brittle so that it can be removed by rubbing) or solvents – virtues that outweighed its disadvantages in terms of its tendency to bloom (old varnish can lose its transparency and become cloudy or patchy, an effect now referred to as ‘bloom’) and its cost.49 From 1851 the decision was made to use only mastic varnish,50 a practice that continued until the 1930s.

‘Gallery Varnish’ (a mastic varnish mixed with linseed oil),51 which had been employed on the national collection from 1843

by John Seguier, at the suggestion of his brother William, fell from favour because it discoloured quickly, attracted dirt by remaining tacky and was said to become hard and difficult to remove. In the Annual Report of 1858, Eastlake noted that ‘[t]he date of every varnishing is recorded’, and added, ‘[i]t is hoped that this practice of preserving the dates of such operations will always be continued’.52 Thought was also given to protecting the backs of the National Gallery pictures against damage resulting from damp, dust, pollutants and insects (Fig.39). Eastlake was aware that many pictures had been hung with their tops slanting forwards to protect their surfaces and consequently ‘had large deposits of dust lodged on and about their backs’. His 1850 report, co-written with Faraday and Russell, noted ‘the expediency of protecting the picture from the back’ and suggested that ‘this might be effected in most cases by enclosing it in a kind of box,53 or by having the back covered with tinfoil or some impermeable substance’.54 Typically, no measures were taken immediately, and it was left to the 1853 Select Committee to urge action.55 In consultation with Faraday, Eastlake considered a range of different materials. By 1858 he reported that ‘[a]fter many experiments with a view to select a light, impervious, and sufficiently incombustible substance to protect the backs of pictures’, primed canvas had been chosen, and that all the pictures at Trafalgar Square and many on temporary display at

Marlborough House in the Mall (then being used as the National Art Training School) were now protected with canvas, apart from a couple of the largest and a few others that had ‘experimental materials of various kinds’.56 The phrase ‘experimental materials’ was probably an allusion to an unsuccessful trial with ‘patent parchment’ and perhaps to Faraday’s suggestion to employ tinfoil.57 Correspondence between Eastlake and Faraday dated January 1858 records their thoughts about the use of soluble salts on the backings as additional protection against fire, but this idea was not taken up for fear that the salts would diffuse into the painting structure.58 The Annual Report of 1860 recorded that all Gallery pictures (including those on loan to the South Kensington Museum) bar one had their backs protected.

The following year’s report added that all newly acquired paintings were automatically protected in this way.59

47 Select Committee (1850), op. cit. (note 9): Minutes of Evidence: Faraday, 660, 679 and 692. See also H. Boothroyd Brooks: ‘Practical developments in English easelpainting conservation, c.1828–1968, from written sources’, unpublished Ph.D. diss.

(University of London, 1999), pp.19–20.

48 Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3): Minutes of Evidence: Faraday, 5447.

49 See R. White and J. Kirby: ‘A survey of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century varnish compositions found on a selection of paintings in the National Gallery collection’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 22 (2001), p.64. Some Gallery paintings, including Leandro Bassano’s Tower of Babel (NG50), retain traces of darkened, oilcontaining mastic varnish, which White and Kirby, p.69, describe as ‘probably remnants of “Gallery varnish”’. They also note (p.77) that ‘most of the varnishes that were examined that can be related to Italian restorations of the 1860s or thereabouts have been found to contain fir balsam’.

50 Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3), ‘Varnish used in the Gallery’, pp.xii–xiii, and Minutes of Evidence: William Russell, 4870, who noted that the ‘new practice of using mastic varnish only in the gallery’ was ‘done very much [. . .] on the suggestion of Sir Charles Eastlake and myself’; and Annual Report (1858), p.55, where Eastlake noted ‘Mastic varnish alone is used’; in fact, very occasionally, the Gallery

also used dammar.

51 See Brommelle, op. cit. (note 25), pp.180–82; and Boothroyd Brooks, op. cit. (note 47), pp.321–24.

52 Annual Report (1858), p.55.

53 A handful of National Gallery pictures were put in boxes. Wornum’s Diary records a spate of such activity in late 1857/early 1858.

54 Eastlake, Faraday and Russell, op. cit. (note 9), p.69.

55 Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3), ‘Backs of the Pictures’, p.xiii.

56 Annual Report (1858), p.55; see also Annual Report (1857), p.40. On 22nd January 1858 Faraday visited the Gallery and after inspecting the backs of some pictures had recommended ‘common worsted stuff’ over ‘steeped holland’; see Boothroyd Brooks, op. cit. (note 39), p.21.

57 See Wornum’s Diary, 17th October 1859 (Fig.39): ‘The parchment a complete failure – it shrinks and breaks away from the nails – Henceforth I shall use nothing but prepared canvas’; and Annual Report (1860), p.86. For Faraday’s early suggestion of tinfoil, see Select Committee (1850), op. cit. (note 9), paragraph 659. Faraday may have thought tinfoil would be more impermeable and act as a moisture barrier as well as protecting the back of a picture from dirt and atmospheric pollutants.

850

d e c ember 2015

•

clvi1

•

the burlington magazine

38. Ralph Nicholson Wornum, Keeper at the National Gallery during Eastlake’s directorship.

Portrait photograph taken in the studio of William Green, Northumberland, 1873.

(National Gallery, London).

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:19 Page 6

SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE

To repair damaged pictures, Eastlake oversaw structural treatment as well as surface work. Eastlake’s general preference to intervene only whenever it was necessary and safe to do so stemmed from a desire to take as few risks as possible. It led in turn to his consulting experts about possible procedures;60 to his employment only of craftsmen and conservators whose expertise he trusted, namely a handful of private London restorers, some

from long-established family firms;61 to a disinclination to allow off-site restoration work in the belief that moving the paintings meant exposing them to further risk;62 and a hands-on approach to supervising the work himself.63 Eastlake’s tendency to act cautiously is evident in his approach to picture transfer (a process involving replacing a damaged panel or canvas with a new support, usually canvas), which prefigured the modern approach and was very different from earlier methods ‘when canvases and panels were routinely subjected to major structural treatments whether or not they needed them’.64 When asked at the 1853 Select Committee whether he believed transferring a picture from panel to canvas had ‘a tendency to accelerate its destruction’, he answered: ‘Perhaps it has’. To the question as to whether the process ‘should be avoided except in extreme cases?’, he answered: ‘Yes’.65 Hardly any paintings were transferred after they had entered the national collection, although a number seem to have been so treated before they were acquired. Five early German pictures from the Krüger Collection were ‘safely transferred’ from wood to canvas in October 1865,66 but in 1864 a more conservative approach was taken for an altarpiece by Bergognone, and George Morrill had restricted himself to ‘the reduction of the blisters’.67 Eastlake admitted the dangers associated with lining paintings to the 1853 Select Committee,68 but by then it was considered a routine preventative measure, and Francis Leedham and his successor Morrill were employed by the Gallery, notably before and after Eastlake’s directorship, for this task,69 as well as to cradle panels (‘parquetting’).

Eastlake initiated a programme to cleanse the picture surfaces of dirt and as far as possible to renew the lustre of the varnish by preventing it from ‘chilling’ (another term for ‘bloom’).70 Unlike many commentators in the first half of the nineteenth century, he thought that surface cleaning was a delicate operation to be entrusted to an expert – John Bentley’s name recurs frequently.71 The process ranged from wiping and dusting (cotton, feather brushes or silk handkerchiefs were all employed) to partial washing of the surface of a picture (typically, a wrung-out sponge or leather, dipped in either clean water, soap and water, or a paste of pea-meal and water, was passed over the surface, which was then dried with an old linen cloth), before polishing the surface to make it clear and glossy.

Reducing layers of discoloured varnish was held to be yet more hazardous by Eastlake, especially in terms of public reaction after the cleaning controversies of 1846 and 1852. According to John Seguier’s account of what had occurred in 1852, he had cleaned the varnish using friction whenever possible, but in a few

58 NGA, NG5/244/1858, letter from Faraday to Eastlake, 23rd January 1858, and letter from Eastlake to Wornum, 25th January 1858.

59 See Annual Report (1860), p.86 and Annual Report (1861), p.100.

60 Perugino’s three panels from an altarpiece once at the Certosa at Pavia (NG288), bought in 1856, were inspected by the painter William Mulready, the restorer John Bentley and one John M. Smith. Their verdict of 20th July 1856 (NGA, NG5/129/4) was conservative, suggesting ‘it would not be advisable to touch the pictures at present’.

61 For further information about National Gallery restorers, see Penny, op. cit. (note 37), ‘A note on conservators’, pp.xiv–xv; and Jacob Simon’s selective directory, ‘British Picture Restorers, 1600–1950’, on the National Portrait Gallery’s website (http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/directory-of-british-picture-restorers.php).

Interestingly, Eastlake never employed Ramsay Richard Reinagle (1775–1862) as a restorer despite the latter’s repeated offers of his services (often gratis) as a picture cleaner in 1846, 1853 and 1858; see NGA, NG5/63/8, NG5/98/5 and NG5/245/1.

Reinagle was expelled from the Royal Academy in 1848 for having attempted to pass off another’s work as his own.

62 In his 1845 letter to Peel, op. cit. (note 25), p.17, Eastlake had advocated the

establishment of a restoration studio at the Gallery partly to minimise picture movement.

63 Matthew Hayes, during research for his Ph.D., has found a number of letters from Eastlake to Wornum or to Gallery restorers giving practical advice; see, for instance, letter from Eastlake to Wornum, 21st June 1865 (NGA, NG5/161/9).

64 D. Bomford: Conservation of Paintings, London 2009, p.35.

65 Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3): Minutes of Evidence: Eastlake, 6619–20.

66 Annual Report (1865), p.148; and National Gallery Minutes of Board Meetings (NGA, NG1/4), 4th December 1865, p.374.

67 Annual Report (1865), p.138; National Gallery Minutes of Board Meetings (NGA, NG1/4), 17th April 1865, pp.350–51 and 22nd May 1865, p.354; and Wornum’s Diary, 26th September 1864.

68 Select Committee (1853), op. cit. (note 3): Minutes of Evidence: Eastlake, 4779.

69 Annual Report (1856), p.14, notes, for instance, that Barocci’s Madonna del gatto (NG29) had been successfully relined by Leedham, on the recommendation of the late Keeper William Seguier.

70 Annual Report (1857), p.39.

71 See, for instance, Annual Report (1856), p.14, where Bentley’s ‘care and experience’ is recorded.

39. Page from Wornum’s Diary: the entry for 17th October 1859 condemns the use of patent parchment to cover the backs of Gallery pictures. (National Gallery archive: NGA2/3/2/13. National Gallery, London).

the burlington mag a z i n e

•

clvi1

•

december 2015

851

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:20 Page 7

SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE

40. Photograph of An allegory with Venus and Cupid, by Agnolo Bronzino, showing Raffaele Pinti’s overpainting of Venus’s tongue and nipple and adding draperies, after the picture’s acquisition in 1860. Pinti’s changes were removed in 1958. (National Gallery, London).

cases he had used solvents, including on Veronese’s Consecration of St Nicholas. For the 1853 Select Committee Faraday undertook some related experiments to remove varnish by applying spirits of wine to the paint surface.72 Its Commissioners noted that generally it was not considered desirable ‘to bare the actual surface of the original master’s work, but to leave some lower part of the coat of varnish, in order both to protect the surface of the picture, and also to maintain a little of that mellow tone which the public prefer in an ancient work of art’.73 Not surprisingly, there is no mention in the Annual Reports of paintings already in the Gallery having their varnish removed completely during Eastlake’s directorship.

In an attempt to regenerate the surface of pictures Eastlake experimented with the so-called ‘Pettenkofer Process’, a technique named after its inventor Professor Maximilian Pettenkofer (1818–1901), of the University of Munich, which claimed to

72

See Boothroyd Brooks, op. cit. (note 39), p.20.

Quoted in Brommelle, op. cit. (note 25), p.178.

74 Annual Report (1865), p.139.

75 L. Keith: ‘Andrea del Sarto’s “The Virgin and Child with Saint Elizabeth and Saint John the Baptist”: Technique and critical reputation’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 22 (2001), p.52.

76 Annual Report (1865), pp.138–41, lists sixteen paintings to which the process had been applied. See also Wornum’s Diary where a longer list is given of pictures which had old varnish restored ‘according to Professor Pettenkofer’s system’ between 7th and 21st October 1864.

77 S. Schmitt: ‘Examination of paintings treated by Pettenkofer’s process’, in Cleaning, Retouchings and Coatings: Preprints of the Contributions to the Brussels IIC Congress, 1990, pp.81–84; and Boothroyd Brooks, op. cit. (note 47), pp.263–67. Keith, op. cit. (note 73

852

d e c ember 2015

•

clvi1

•

the burlington magazine

‘restore the surface of pictures in oil, without any danger to their original state’. Although Eastlake was told by Mündler that certain German and Austrian museum directors were sceptical about its efficacy, Eastlake was initially positive about this process on account of its scientific credibility and artistic results. While it did not ‘clean’ pictures but restored the transparency of the varnish, one of the ‘peculiarities’ of the process was that ‘the picture [did] not require to be touched; the effect being entirely produced by the action of the vapour’,74 given that the picture was exposed to alcohol vapour in a sealed chamber, which had the ‘effect of swelling and thereby regenerating the resinous varnish layers’.75 The conditions and results of the operations at the Gallery as well as extracts from Pettenkofer’s English patent were published in the 1865 Annual Report.76 It is clear that those pictures which were so treated received only a ‘Pettenkofer-lite’ version in which solvent vapour was used, and which affected only the varnish but not the underlying paint. Fortunately the version that employed copaiba balsam was not used in London, for it caused ‘defects in the varnish and the paint layers and particularly in the interaction between the two’.77 In August 1865 the cautious Eastlake instructed Wornum that ‘no further experiments in the process are to be made this year’ given that the process was still on trial and it still had to be established ‘whether the surface continues glossy as long as or longer than a freshly varnished surface’.78 Restoration work took place comparatively rarely at Trafalgar Square during Eastlake’s directorship. Occasionally, he would order the removal of previous restorations79 and false inscriptions.80 Raffaele Pinti (1826–81), an Italian liberal in exile in England who had been helped to establish himself as a picture cleaner by the 3rd Marquess of Northampton, worked increasingly for Eastlake from 1858, especially on Italian paintings that had not been bought in Italy; his employment came to an end in 1871 with the suspension of the Gallery’s annual purchase grant. On the one hand, he made quite radical alterations to a few pictures, usually on moral or aesthetic grounds. For instance, in the case of Bronzino’s An allegory with Venus and Cupid, purchased from the Beaucousin collection in 1860, Pinti, following Eastlake’s advice to alter ‘the details of the kiss’, removed Venus’s tongue and nipple to make it suitable for display to the prudish Victorian public (Fig.40).81 On the other hand, Eastlake wrote to Wornum in November 1864 that Sassoferrato’s Virgin and Child required ‘a little revision and possibly a little patina before it is hung up’ to give greater aesthetic harmony and beauty to the work.82 Consequently, Pinti overpainted parts of the Virgin’s blue robe and the green curtain and applied a brown pigmented varnish. As with Molteni’s restoration work, Pinti’s overpainting was done in readily soluble media which has allowed later restorers to remove his extraneous additions with relative ease.

75), p.52, notes: ‘no trace of copaiba balsam was found in any of the medium analyses undertaken by the Scientific Department, nor was there any sign of unusual solubility of varnish or paint layers in any part of the 1992 treatment’.

78 Letter from Eastlake to Wornum, 3rd August 1865 (NGA, NG5/161/11).

79 E.g., Wornum’s Diary, 12th November 1861: ‘Mr Bentley brought the Gainsborough head, stript [sic] of its superadded paint’.

80 E.g., Wornum’s Diary, 23rd December 1858: ‘Inscription on the Palmezzano examined by Sigr. Pinti and discovered to be spurious . . .’ (Palmezzano, The dead Christ with the Virgin and saints, NG596).

81 See J. Anderson: ‘A “most improper picture”: Transformations of Bronzino’s erotic allegory’, Apollo 139 (February 1994), pp.19–28, with photographs of the painting before its 1958 restoration. See also letter from Eastlake to Wornum, 3rd February 1860 (NGA, NG5/328/4), in which Eastlake declared: ‘I am still of the opinion that

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:20 Page 8

SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE

Other restorers working in London were involved with minor repainting. In a memorandum about pictures that needed attention, Eastlake mentioned Bentley and Henry Merritt in connection with work to be undertaken on various pictures including the Pollaiuolos’ St Sebastian and Filippino Lippi’s Virgin and Child with Sts Jerome and Dominic.83 Both were also brought in to revise some of Ugo Baldi’s repair work.84 But these kinds of intervention were the exception: Eastlake’s general rule for new acquisitions was to allow minimal interventions and he often suggested that no action should be taken at all.85 His approach was on a par with the leading galleries of Berlin and Rome, where the principle seems to have been to do as little as possible.86 Eastlake also monitored the wellbeing of National Gallery pictures that, through lack of space in William Wilkins’s building on Trafalgar Square (the Gallery had moved there in 1838, and until 1869 the Royal Academy of Arts occupied half the space), were temporarily displayed at Marlborough House and from late 1859 at the South Kensington Museum – for the most part the contemporary British pictures, mainly from the Vernon and Turner collections. Henry Cole, first director of the South Kensington Museum, insisted on lighting the paintings by gaslight, overruling Eastlake and his Trustees, who worried that fluctuating temperatures might cause thermal shock to the pictures.87 They were also concerned that the use of gas lighting (which enabled evening opening) might have a deleterious effect on the surface of pictures from the gas or its combustion products – quite apart from problems of fire safety or aesthetic concerns.88 Cole and his staff believed that the use of gas lighting was not harmful, but Eastlake and his Trustees remained adamant that the evidence was inconclusive, and said so in numerous letters to Cole and in evidence to various committees convened to debate the issue.89 Several pictures which seemed to be cracking were withdrawn from South Kensington for urgent repair, including a group in May 1865. While the Royal Academy had installed artificial lighting in its side of the building in the 1860s (the gas-fittings were taken down once it moved to Burlington House), Eastlake did not allow the Continental old-master pictures to be lit by gaslight at the Trafalgar Square site, a decision followed by his successors. It was only in the 1930s that artificial lighting – by now electric light – was introduced at the National Gallery.

When the Select Committee of 1853 convened, there was no written evidence, apart from inadequate Minutes (they started to be kept systematically only from 1855), to help the jurors reach a verdict on the 1852 cleaning controversy, while the witness statements exhibited ‘great contrariety of judgment and irreconcilable differences of taste’. By contrast, during

if the details of the kiss (Venus is kissing Cupid) are altered the rest may pass’.

82 See letter from Eastlake to Wornum, 16th November 1864 (NGA, NG5/158/11); and J. Dunkerton: ‘The cleaning and technique of two paintings by Sassoferrato’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 128 (1986), p.287.

83 See (undated) ‘Memoranda respecting pictures, not yet placed in the Gallery, requiring more or less restoration, varnish &c’. (NGA, NG5/242/2).

84 Information kindly supplied by Matthew Hayes.

85 For his conservative attitude, see Eastlake’s comments that very little should be done, for instance, to Veronese’s The family of Darius before Alexander (NG294) and Filippino Lippi’s The Virgin and Child with Sts Jerome and Dominic (NG293) in his ‘Memoranda’, op. cit. (note 83).

86 Brommelle, op. cit. (note 25), p.180.

87 Wornum recorded his concerns about the fluctuating temperatures at the South

41. Eastlake’s ‘Manuscript Catalogue’, showing his entry for Sebastiano del Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus (NG1). Under the heading ‘On what material painted’, Eastlake notes that the picture had been ‘Transferred to canvas by Hacquin in 1771’ and under ‘When repaired’, he notes that the picture had been retouched by Benjamin West. (National Gallery archive: NG10/1. National Gallery, London).

Eastlake’s directorship it was established that all treatment should be adequately documented. In the Treasury Minute that reconstituted the Gallery, ‘one of most important duties’ for the Director was the construction of ‘a correct history of every picture in the collection, including its repairs, and describing accurately its present condition, which history will be continued

Kensington Museum; e.g., Wornum’s Diary, 14th February 1865: ‘Found the picture

by Newton – “Yorick & the Grisette”, cracking in a most deplorable way, as are also many others; think the daily change of temperature, varying sometimes 20° has a great deal to do with this destruction of pictures which is going on at Kensington’.

88 See G.N. Swinney: ‘“The evil of vitiating and heating the air”: Artificial lighting and public access to the National Gallery, London, with particular reference to the Turner and Vernon collections’, Journal of the History of Collections 15 (2003), pp.85–100.

89 The Department of Science and Art undertook experiments in 1857 to assess the effect of different atmospheres on pictures; in 1859 there was a Commission On the Lighting of Picture Galleries by Gas; in 1861 there was a Select Committee on the Turner and Vernon Pictures; and in 1869 there was a Commission On the Heating, Lighting, and Ventilation of the South Kensington Museum; see Boothroyd Brooks, op. cit. (note 39), p.21 and Swinney, op. cit. (note 88), passim. the burlington mag a z i n e

•

clvi1

•

december 2015

853

AOC2.DEC.AveryQuash.pp.proof.corr.qxp_Layout 1 17/11/2015 11:20 Page 9

SIR CHARLES EASTLAKE

from time to time by new entries as occasion may require’.90 This led to the creation of the so-called ‘Manuscript Catalogue’, with subheadings on ‘On what Material painted’, ‘In what Method painted’, ‘When repaired’, ‘Actual State’, and ‘General History’, and information about a picture’s conservation history (Fig.41).91 The result was a fourteen-volume document, whose compilation preoccupied Eastlake between 1856 and 1858.

Although entries were increasingly brief,92 especially after Eastlake’s death, his pioneering catalogue found new expression in the 1930s when conservation dossiers were started.93 It may also have influenced the establishment of similar types of cataloguing in other British art collections.94 Eastlake also introduced the Director’s annual report to the Treasury, first printed in 1856, establishing a format that continued until the Second World War. Those published reports included notes about the treatment of paintings and yearly statistics for ‘Pictures Protected by Glass’ and ‘Pictures Varnished’. Most of these facts were taken from Wornum’s Diary, which the Keeper kept from August 1855 to November 1877. Such information continued to be included in the Annual Reports but in less detail after 1858, when the reports became more concise.

Eastlake, who was first President of the Photographic Society, used photographs to help him decide on the attribution and authenticity of a painting, but it has often been said that he did not exploit photography for conservation issues. However, evidence seems to show that Eastlake and his circle did use photographs in such circumstances, both for old masters and the modern British art collection. For instance, Mündler had Verrocchio’s Virgin and Child with two angels photographed before Molteni’s treatment, and in July 1857, when Eastlake requested photographs of pictures in the South Kensington Museum, he learnt from Cole that they had been taken both before and after restoration.

Clearly Eastlake continued to exploit photography, for in 1860 he and Richard Redgrave of the South Kensington Museum made notes on the conditions of British School paintings on loan from Trafalgar Square, and ten pictures were photographed to show surface deterioration.95 Redgrave’s annotations on one of the photographs records Eastlake’s key role in the project’s inception: ‘Photograph of part of the Joshua Reynolds picture of the Holy Family done at the request of Sir C. Eastlake in order to test the progress of the cracks. 1860’.96 In 1956, Norman Brommelle, a picture restorer at the National Gallery, provocatively suggested that ‘There is little to interest the historian of conservation in the years after the 1853 Enquiry’ and called the phase of conservation ending with Eastlake’s death in December 1865 ‘a period of stagnation’.97 In his opinion, the major preoccupation of Eastlake’s directorship ‘was the building

up of the collection rather than the problems of conservation’.98 Brommelle was writing about the Eastlake era from his own experiences at the National Gallery (where he was employed from 1949 to 1960), when the Director Philip Hendy and the émigré restorer Helmut Ruhemann were overseeing an ambitious and contentious programme of restoration, building on research undertaken during the War under Kenneth Clark’s directorship.

Eastlake’s comparatively conservative approach towards restoration at Trafalgar Square during his time as Director (1855–65) stemmed from his wish to avoid public criticism, which led to him opting to have some Gallery pictures treated in Italy, while in London he concentrated on preventative conservation. His contemporaries at sister institutions, such as Redgrave and J.C. Robinson, both employed by the South Kensington Museum and both associated with the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Royal Collections, were aware of the cleaning controversy at the National Gallery, and this may have influenced their preventative approach towards picture cleaning.99 I would argue that Eastlake may be viewed as a new kind of ‘Director of Restoration’, and that in that role he was instrumental in nurturing a new awareness of the need for good working practices, establishing much that is now taken for granted in modern preventative conservation, helping in practical ways to advocate a new professionalism in the care of collections and in its general organisation. Under his watch, what had been a haphazard approach to picture cleaning, conservation and restoration was standardised and organised. One characteristic of Eastlake’s tenure of office was a new international outlook, based in part on a reliance on a network of colleagues abroad, including Molteni, to develop his understanding about various techniques. Some of his most trusted advisers, including Faraday, were scientists and he consistently used science to inform his approach to conservation policy, even advocating at the 1853 Select Committee that the Gallery consult chemists in matters of restoration. He was meticulous in his note-taking and recordkeeping (his conservation records are still constantly referenced), setting new standards that became the norm both at the Gallery and elsewhere. This did not mean that Eastlake was consistently transparent about all the procedures he adopted – he did not go out of his way to draw attention to the work of the Italian or British restorers. His decisions concerning alterations to pictures for moral or aesthetic reasons would not be upheld today, but by the standards of his own time he was acting in good faith.

Ultimately, Eastlake’s dedication to the physical welfare of the pictures in his charge assisted the development of the modern belief that conservation is an essential component in the care of collections.

90

introduction in 1858 of a systematic survey of the royal picture collection. This manuscript catalogue may have been inspired by Eastlake’s earlier document.

95 See A. Hamber: “A Higher Branch of the Art”: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839–1880, Amsterdam 1996, chapter 6 on the National Gallery, esp. pp.343–44.

96 Quoted in Boothroyd Brooks, op. cit. (note 39), p.57. The photograph referred to (V. & A. 39:489) is reproduced in Brajer, op. cit. (note 31), p.60, fig.7. See also Select Committee (1861), op. cit. (note 89): Minutes of Evidence: Eastlake, 104.

97 Brommelle, op. cit. (note 25), p.186.

98 Ibid., p.178.

99 See G. Waterfield: ‘Conservation at Dulwich Picture Gallery in the Nineteenth Century’, in Sitwell and Staniforth, op. cit. (note 2), pp.124–27; and I. McClure: ‘The history of painting conservation and the Royal Collection’, in ibid., pp.92–94.

Treasury Minute, op. cit. (note 26), p.4 and Annual Report (1856), p.13.

In the first volume of the Manuscript Catalogue (NGA, NG10/1) Eastlake describes it as a ‘Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, having reference more particularly to their material condition’.

92 Research undertaken by Matthew Hayes for his doctorate on conservation history, suggests that not every action was recorded: there are payments for restoration in the Cash Book 1855–1866 (NGA, NG13/1/3) which find no entry in the Manuscript Catalogue.

93 See Ruhemann op. cit. (note 21), p.118.

94 See O. Millar: ‘Redgrave and the Royal Collection’, in S.P. Casteras and R. Parkinson, eds.: Richard Redgrave 1804–1888, New Haven and London 1988, pp.87–88; and N. Costaras: ‘Richard Redgrave (1804–1888): First curator of paintings at the South Kensington Museum’, in Brajer, op. cit. (note 31), p.65, for Redgrave’s 91

854

d e c ember 2015

•

clvi1

•

the burlington magazine