Volume 33 includes five articles covering recent research undertaken at the National Gallery, including two articles co-written by TSR’s Kate Stonor on French 19th and early 20th century painting. Ashok Roy, Rachel Billinge and Christopher Riopelle take an opportunity to re-evaluate an iconic painting in ‘Renoir’s Umbrellas Unfurled Again’. New information gleaned by using the OSIRIS camera to make a new infrared reflectogram and digitally re-processing the old x-ray image using NIP allowed a clearer interpretation of the separate stages of Renoir’s re-working of the painting.
Kate Stonor and Rachel Morrison investigate and re-evaluate a now overlooked artist in ‘Adolphe Monticelli: The Techniques and Materials of an Unfashionable Artist’. Exploring his eccentric techniques whilst taking into account his influence on the Modern Masters Van Gogh and Cézanne. Sampling of Monticelli’s relatively simple pigment mixtures also allowed inferences to be made regarding the possible content of the tube paints he was using and the influence commercial paint formulations had on artists working in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Anne Robbins and Kate Stonor examine the distemper technique in ‘Past, Present, Memories: Analysing Edouard Vuillard’s La Terrasse at Vasouy’, another painting with complex re-workings which were better understood through technical examination. In particular Vuillard’s use of titanium white in the second painting campaign, which allowed the later re-workings to be firmly identified .
Marika Spring builds on her excellent research into pigment technology in her study of ‘Colourless Powdered Glass as an Additive in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century European Paintings’. Close examination and quantitative elemental analysis of cross sections has shown that the addition of colourless glass was a relatively common practice amongst European artists during this period, who added the material to adapt the properties of their oil paint. Soda ash glass was found predominantly in Italian paintings whilst wood or fern ash glass was identified in Northern European works.
Finally, Britta New et al. explore the complex physical history of an early Italian altarpiece in ‘Niccolò di Pietro Gerini’s Baptism Altarpiece: Technique, Conservation and Original Design’; investigating new evidence revealed by recent conservation treatment for its original structure and putting forward two possible reconstructions.
