Notes
Report of Examination:
This oil on canvas painting is a portrait of a middle aged man with brwon hair and a brown moustache. His clothes appear boscured by disrupted varnish. the background is apparently dark and featureless. The painting has been previously restored including cleaning, overpainting, mounting on a wooden panel and revarnishing. At present, the painting is disfigured extensively by severely blanched varnish, the result of extreme exposure to water.
The painting is mounted on a 1/8" five- ply wooden panel with smoothly finished faces, apparently mahogany. a softwood stretcher, probably the original, has been glued and nailed to the reverse throught the front., and a additional horizontal crossbar has been added. The wooden support is sound and stable, with no apparent damage.
the canvas is apparently linen in a very fine closed tabby weave with 22x22 z-spun threads per cm2. The tacking margins were removed, but there are no other apparent losses of the original canvas. The obscuring varnish condition, howefer, may conceal small canvas losses. The canvas was successfully attached to a panel, prior to water damage, with an adhesive that is probably glue. However, xcess moisture has affected the canvas causing many small hrizontal ripples of paint to lift frm the surface, about 1" long and primarily located in the top and bottom thirdds of the painting.
The ground layer is apparently oil-medium, thinly and evenly appllied to the canvas without hiding the fine canvas texture. The ground is sound and stable, although there are very small losses of ground at the edges of the horizontal ripples indicating a presently ppoor adhesion to the canvas.
The paint is oil-medium, thinly and directly appled in layers with no impasto. The paint is hard and brittle and very finely cracked in a regular and tightly linked pattern with intervals less than 1/16". Flakes defined by the fissures are firmly adhered to the ground and they are not cupped or lifted with the exception of the ripples caused by recent water damage. Microscopic examination reveals that contraction of canvas threads has tented tiny paint flakes at each ripple. very small flakes of paint and grond have been lost from some edges of the ripples. The entire paint surface has ben evenly abraded by past cleanings; esp. in the most thinly painted areas where the grond shows through in a pattrn that reveals the texture of the canvas beneath. Small areas of mechanical paint abrasion have resently occurred as result of scraping blows to the surface. Due to the previous sound panel mounting, the damage caused by these blows was relatively slight, affecting the paint surface only slightly. Restoration repaint from past treatments can be seen on the paint surface covering presious solvent abrasion and partially removed discolored varnish; this is also visible in the portrait of Mrs. Drayton. ( It appears that the same restorer treated both paintings in the same manner and probably at the same time).
The surface of the paint is covered with moderately and evenly aplied layers of varnish. THe varnish has ben severely disrupted by exposure to water. IT has blanched in a mottled pattern that is completely opaque in some areas and milky in others. The varnish layers are soluable in Acetone. IT can be expected that in this case the paint layer itself has been blanched by water in addition to the varnish layers.