Reading multiple choice

Every conservator remembers the first time a client cried. Mine was a retired schoolteacher who had brought in a small landscape that had hung above her parents’ fireplace for sixty years. Decades of coal smoke and yellowed varnish had turned the sky the colour of weak tea, and she wanted it ‘cleaned up a bit’. When I removed the varnish from a test patch the size of a postage stamp, a startling blue appeared underneath. She looked at it for a long moment and then burst into tears, though not, as I first assumed, from joy. ‘That’s not our painting,’ she said.

She had a point, and it is one that my profession has been arguing about for well over a century. The blue was, in one sense, the ‘real’ painting: the colour the artist had chosen and applied. But for three generations of her family, the painting had been brown and golden and slightly gloomy, and that was the painting they had loved. Removing the varnish would recover the artist’s intention while erasing the family’s history. Which of these has the stronger claim?

The textbook answer is that our duty is to the object, not to its owners’ memories, and in museums that answer is usually right. A public collection holds paintings in trust for people not yet born, and it would be odd to preserve layers of dirt simply because visitors had grown used to them. When a famous ceiling or altarpiece is cleaned and the colours turn out to be far brighter than anyone expected, there is always an outcry, and the outcry is almost always forgotten within a generation. Nobody now argues that the grime should be put back.

Yet I have become suspicious of how confidently we talk about ‘the artist’s intention’, as though it were a fixed point we could reach by removing enough layers. Painters knew perfectly well that varnish would yellow; some of them, it is fairly clear, counted on it. Pigments fade and shift at different rates, so a picture cleaned back to its original surface may present a balance of colours that never existed at any moment in its history. In stripping away the ‘later additions’, we sometimes produce a painting that is not older but simply newer: a version invented in our own studio, with our own tastes quietly built in.

This is why the profession’s central principle these days is reversibility. Whatever we add, whether fresh varnish, filler in a damaged area or a few touches of paint to disguise a crack, must be removable by some future conservator without harming the original. It is an admirably modest idea, an acknowledgement that our judgements are provisional and that the people who come after us will probably think we got things wrong. It is also, in practice, harder to honour than it sounds. The removal of varnish, the most common intervention of all, cannot be reversed. Once the old layer has gone, it has gone.

So in the case of the brown landscape, I did something that would have horrified my tutors: very little. I cleaned off the surface dirt, which had no defenders, secured a patch of flaking paint near the frame, and left the old varnish where it was. My client went home with the painting she remembered, slightly brighter, and a photograph of the test patch, which she later told me she kept in a drawer and occasionally took out to look at, ‘like a letter from someone I never met’.

I do not claim this was the correct decision; I am not sure there was one. A museum curator would have been right to choose differently, and the painting may one day be cleaned by someone with fewer sentimental scruples than mine. That person will find the old varnish waiting, undisturbed. Perhaps that is the most a conservator can reasonably hope for: not to have restored a painting to its truth, but to have left the next person with an honest set of choices.