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Inspiration from Artists Week Eleven: Peter Prendegast and Michael Morgan.
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Message
Posted
Interesting that the portrait of the woman with the cigarette (I wonder how many she got through during that sitting) is badly crazed and cracked in the background, whereas his other paintings - which I assume are also oils - seem to have come through unscathed. I'd love to know his working methods - the crazing has spread over the whole painting, except for the figure..... I wonder what white he was using, what he mixed with his paint: because th is is quite extreme damage for a painting as relatively young as this one. I don't much care for the style of Victorian narrative painting, but he did move on from that, and at the very least had a high level of technical skill.
Posted
I’m pretty sure that the figure itself has had a fair bit of restoration, and not particularly good, certain areas are quite poorly painted!
It’s impossible for just the background to have suffered such bad flaking/cracking, oil paint doesn’t differentiate between background and sitter!
It almost looks like a cut out stuck on, hard edges against the background etc… not a good restoration.
Edited
by Alan Bickley
Posted
Alan, you may be right - of course, we don't know what conditions the canvas has been stored in; or whether it's been re-stretched. I have seen this sort of damage when an inferior black - Lamp, or in some cases Ivory/Bone - was used; and it can happen on a Zinc White substrate, but if it had ... why is the figure immune? Did he use a different white? It doesn't make sense, does it..... unless, as you suggest, someone has tried repainting the background; though notice that the crazing extends into the painting's bottom right; quite possible that was re-painted as well. Another thing that can cause this is premature varnishing - but Elwell wouldn't have done that, he was a highly experienced painter: again, someone else, having been daft enough to re-paint the background, would also presumably be daft enough to varnish it too soon.... I'd be very interested to know, but probably we never will.
Unless ...... someone out there knows better!
PS - Just noticed something very odd about her right shoulder - a half-hearted attempt has been made to balance it properly - this painting has been "got at".
Edited
by Robert Jones, NAPA
This was also a favourite of mine. Portrait of Florence Elwell.
Posted
Quite likely that the figure was repainted, over a painting that was beginning - for whatever reason - to fall to bits. Given it's shown on online catalogues of his work - of which there is a great deal - someone must know what happened to it. I agree that it's not just the obviously flaking, crumbling background: compare the flesh tones of the portrait Denise just uploaded (of his daughter, presumably) with those of the ciggy-lady's portrait - the former is far more sensitively done (and it's presumably the older painting of the two). Anyway, I think we can say that Mr Elwell was a versatile artist, who produced a very large volume of work over his 88 years; it would seem that some of it has suffered a bit - apart from that portrait, one of the landscapes looked as if it needed to be cleaned and re-varnished.
Posted
Well this certainly has caused some discussion , when I posted the painting I thought that the painting under discussion was looking worst for wear. As I don’t work with oils I would not have know what caused the cracking , it’s good to read the on going discussions about it , a great learning opportunity as well. A couple more of his painting that I quite like , I’ve included one Royal painting as he apparently did several .
