The Conservation of the Jabach Portrait: Starting the Retouching

Michael Gallagher uses gouache paint to retouch losses in the Jabach portrait, which has been undergoing conservation for the past eight months.

«With the exception of the inevitable damage caused by the turning over of the top of the canvas to attach it to a smaller stretcher (see my September 24, 2014, post about this aspect of the painting's history), the great Jabach family portrait is in exceptional condition. Nevertheless, there are several small losses and scrapes that are typical for a painting of this age and size and which hung in domestic interiors—albeit quite grand ones—for centuries. So the next step is to retouch these areas.»

The aim of retouching, or "inpainting," is essentially to suppress damage that would otherwise be distracting or that would pull down the quality of a painting by reducing it to a scarred artifact rather than a work of art. There are many approaches to this important stage in the conservation process and just as many philosophies supporting them. I would say, however, that the approaches all now share the desire to respect the artist's work and original intentions and aim to limit the intervention to an effective minimum. Finally, the retouching should be as stable as possible and—crucially—be reversible, so that it can be removed easily and safely at any time in the future.

I tend to use a two-phase approach. Following the initial varnishing and the filling of the paint losses, which I described in my previous post, I retouch the actual losses with gouache paint. This is what I can be seen doing in the short film above.

The aim at this stage is not to achieve a close match with the surrounding paint—that will happen in the second phase—but rather to create an underpaint that is usually cooler and lighter in tone than the surrounding original. In other words, it isn't finished yet!

After a second brush application of varnish, I will move on to the second phase. As retouching progresses, hopefully the small damages will essentially "disappear" so that this extraordinarily well-preserved painting can take up 100% of the viewer's attention.

See all posts related to the Jabach painting.