Where should we put it?

If you read my blog regularly you’ll know we recently bought three paintings from a brocante not too far from us. They all need a little bit of attention, and Brian’s taking his time doing what he can when he can fit it in between other little jobs.

Yesterday he found a bit of time to take a look at this one. It was pretty dirty/dusty, and there was at least one scratch in the paintwork.

It’s a real labour of love, he started by cleaning the surface with a very diluted detergent and water mix. This was quite painstaking, but as you can see it took off years of dirt.

Next he tried a very small part of the painting with white spirit, which reacted well, so he pushed on and cleaned again with that. This was a deeper clean, and also removed a very thin layer of the yellowing varnish on top. It’s hard to get an accurate rendition of the change from start to cleaned, but these two shots are pretty true. I like the cleaner hues of the cleaned one.

On the right of the painting there was a rather deep scratch through the tree, which really stuck out as the contrast was so great. As the painting is done in oils, Brian thought it would be best to colour match it in acrylic, so if anyone in the distant future wanted to reverse it they could.

I have to say I think it’s a pretty marvellous job.

Now where should we put it?