A
fresh wave of discord came in mid-19th century England and abroad. By this time old master paintings had developed
an accumulation of smoke, grime, and yellow-brown varnish thought by some to display a natural mellowing and harmonizing
effect that should be left alone. British artist Sir George Beaumont advocated, “A good painting, like a good violin, should
be brown.” His friend John Constable offered a refutation by showing an old fiddle on a green lawn. Beaumont remained
unmoved. The idea that old paintings should bear the signs of old age would prove tenacious, to the extent that brown pigments
came to be added to the varnish of old pictures to maintain an “old masters golden glow.”
Titian (1488-1576)
Bacchus and Ariadne
1520-1523
oil on canvas
69 ½ x 75”
National Gallery, London
Among a plethora of treatments over the centuries, the varnish was revived by the Pettenkofer process in 1865.
In 1844 Charles Eastlake, Keeper of the Collection at the National Gallery, London, initiated a new policy of picture cleaning.
The in-house restorer had routinely applied a “gallery varnish,” comprised of mastic varnish and boiled linseed oil (both certain
to turn brown), when pictures seemed to need freshening up. A display of cleaned paintings without a brown patina set off
shock waves. One observer remarked that Titian’s brilliantly colored Bacchus and Ariadne had been “scraped raw” in a “series
of barbarisms.” John Ruskin, on the other hand, held that this picture “escaped scot free.” The new look of other paintings,
such as Rubens’s Peace and War and the Judgment of Paris, were met with such vituperation as “completely flayed,” “scoured
off the glazing entirely,” and “characteristic ignorance.” Confusion over the difference between a glaze and a varnish would lie
at the center of another heated controversy concerning cleaned pictures at the National Gallery a century later.
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ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE