British picture restorers, 1600-1950 - N

An online resource, launched in 2009, selectively updated twice yearly. Last updated March 2024. Contributions are welcome, to Jacob Simon at [email protected].

Introduction
Resources and bibliography

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

[NI] [NO]

*John C. Nairn 1869-1900, John C. Nairn & Sons 1901-1910, John C. Nairn & Son 1911-1931. At 8 Hamilton Row, Dublin 1869-1873, 51 Denzille St, Merrion Square 1874-1914 (also at no.52 by 1884), 13 Westland Row by 1910-1931. Picture restorers, by c.1884 also agents for artists.

John Campbell Nairn (1831-1913), a leading Dublin picture restorer, was the son of George Nairn (1799-1850), animal and portrait painter, and his wife Celia Campbell (1791-1857), also an artist. By his first marriage, to Ellen Carr, John Campbell Nairn had several children, including George Ivor Nairn, who trained as a painter before joining the British Army. These and the following biographical details come from a family tree supplied by George Nairn, George Ivor Nairn’s grandson, following publicity in 1995 concerning a time capsule found at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford (see below). By his second marriage, to his housekeeper, Johanne Byrne, John Campbell Nairn had further children, apparently including Robert Nairn, who was active in his father’s business as a picture restorer (see below).

John C. Nairn & Son’s trade card described the business as picture cleaners and restorers (to the National Gallery, Dublin, added in manuscript) and claimed forty years practical experience. The business gave 3 Duck Lane, Soho, the premises of the picture liners, William Morrill & Son (qv), as its London address, and Garfield Chambers, 42 Royal Avenue as its Belfast address. It offered to line pictures, to transfer them from the original panel or canvas to new canvas and to clean and restore old engravings and mezzotints. For a partial list of clients, see below.

Following John C. Nairn’s death in 1913, it was advertised that the business, ‘John C. Nairn & Son’, would be continued by his son William Joseph Nairn (b.1880) at 13 Westland Row but not at 51-52 Denzille St (Freemans Journal 4 February 1914).

Restoration work: John C. Nairn & Son cleaned and restored portraits in the Mansion House and the City Hall, Dublin, in 1897 (Belfast News-Letter 8 March 1897). John C. Nairn & Son’s undated trade card (see above) listed as clients the Marquis of Downshire, Hillsborough Castle; Lord Arthur W. Hill, MP, London; Earl Kilmorey, Mourne Park, Newry; Lord O’Neill, Shane’s Castle, Antrim; Earl of Gosford, Gosford Castle, Markethill; Sir James Haslett, MP, Belfast; Sir Samuel Black, Glen Ebor, Strandtown; The President, Queen’s College, Belfast; Major H.S. M’Clintock, Kilwarlin House, Hillsborough; Sir Thomas Farrell, PRHA; and the secretary and the keeper of the Royal Hibernian Academy, and several others.

Robert J. Nairn (b.c.1876) was responsible for restoring the ceiling paintings in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, 1899-1901. He left a time capsule above the paintings, containing newspapers, photographs and a note, now housed in the Bodleian Library (University Archives, ST 50, see Oxford University Gazette, vol.125, 23 February 1995). The note is reproduced at www.oxfordpreservation.org.uk. He was working for John C. Nairn & Son as subcontractors to William Morrill & Son. He produced a detailed report of his work, which was published in The Sheldonian Theatre (copy in University Archives, ST 35) and, as ‘Notes of Observations during its Restoration, 1899-1901 by Mr R.J. Nairn’, in The Architect & Contract Reporter, 6 June 1902, pp.369-72.

Nairn also cleaned and restored James Thornhill’s chapel ceiling painting at the Queen’s College, Oxford in 1900, as is apparent from an annotated photograph in the Sheldonian time capsule, and undertook work for the Ashmolean Museum, 1904 (Ashmolean Report, 1904).

Added August 2019
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. National Gallery of Scotland, opened 1859; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, opened 1889; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, opened 1960.

The National Gallery of Scotland, now the Scottish National Gallery, holds the collections of a number of precursors: the Royal Institution (founded 1819, see section 2), the Royal Scottish Academy (founded 1826, much of the collection transferred to National Gallery 1910, excepting Diploma works) and the Royal Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland (established 1834, dissolved and collection transferred 1897). It also held the Torrie collection on loan from Edinburgh University until much was returned in 1954 (see section 1). Parts of the Gallery’s own collection have been transferred to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which together form the National Galleries of Scotland.

The National Gallery’s building was begun in 1850. Its galleries opened to the public in 1859. Parts of the premises were used by the Royal Scottish Academy until it moved to the adjoining building, formerly housing the Royal Institution, under the terms of a parliamentary order in 1910. Administratively the National Gallery came under the aegis of the Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland, a government department known as the Board of Manufactures, until 1907 when the Gallery received its own Board of Trustees. In 2011 the National Gallery of Scotland was renamed the Scottish National Gallery. This history of picture restoration is in six sections:

  1. The Torrie Collection
  2. The Royal Institution, 1819-59
  3. The National Gallery of Scotland and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery to 1914
  4. The 1920s and 1930s and the role of Stanley Cursiter
  5. A conservation department: The Woolford years, 1940 to 1970
  6. The last fifty years

Certain themes emerge in this two hundred year history:

  • the choice in the 19th century between using artist-restorers or carvers and gilders offering picture restoration.
  • the cautious approach of the trustees to treating 19th-century British works painted with unsound materials, as became increasingly apparent in the 1860s and 1870s
  • a widening range of restorers following the foundation of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
  • thinning out of the displays at the National Gallery in the 1890s to remove second rate pictures and those in poor condition
  • a move in the 1920s and 1930s to employing professional picture restorers whether based in London, The Hague (an unusual choice) or Edinburgh
  • growing interest in the role of science in the examination of pictures in the 1930s
  • the employment of a picture restorer in house in the 1940s, the establishment of a conservation department and the recognition of the professional status of conservators
  • the introduction of air conditioning in the galleries and stores from the 1970s
  • the establishment of a collection centre at Granton in the early 2000s

In the following account, ‘Annual Report’ refers to the sequence of published annual reports from 1907. ‘NG’ refers to documents in the National Records of Scotland relating to the Royal Institution, the Board of Manufactures and the National Galleries of Scotland. Trustee meeting minutes, letter books, financial records, online newspapers and papers relating to a few individual restorers have been examined in compiling this history but few individual picture files.

1. The Torrie Collection

The University of Edinburgh had long held a collection of portraits which needed repair from time to time. Lauchlan McLean was employed on Henry Raeburn’s recommendation to clean portraits in the library in 1801 and the carver and gilder, Adam Elder, repaired pictures in 1816 (Duncan Macmillan, The Torrie Collection, 1983, p.4). For Elder, see British picture framemakers - E.

The Torrie collection of Dutch and some Italian paintings, together with a few remarkable sculptures, came to the University of Edinburgh in 1836. It takes its name from Sir James Erskine, 3rd Baronet of Torrie (1772-1825), who formed his collection in the last 20 years of his life. Little is known of its early care beyond Erskine’s payment to George Simpson of £18.18s in 1820 for cleaning, lining and repairing a picture ‘in very bad condition’, the Veronese studio Venus and Adonis (Duncan Macmillan, A Catalogue of the Torrie Collection, 2004, p.30) and his correspondence with William Pizzetta on cleaning and framing pictures in 1823, including the Guido Reni copy, Ecce Homo, and Hendrick ten Oever’s Canal Landscape with Figures Bathing, then given to Cuyp (National Gallery of Scotland archive, Torrie file, transcripts). For Simpson, a leading London picture dealer and restorer, and Pizzetta, a lesser London restorer, see British picture restorers - S.

The collection came to the university following the death of Sir James’s brother, John, in 1836. The university found it difficult to show the collection effectively and an agreement was reached in 1845 that the pictures should be shown as an entity in the Royal Institution building so that ‘they might be better seen and better preserved’, according to the then Lord Provost (The Scotsman, 4 June 1845). The collection passed with that of the Institution to the new National Gallery of Scotland where it was shown from 1859. In 1954 most of the collection was returned to the university and is now in the care of the Talbot Rice Gallery, which opened in 1975. The Torrie collection’s conservation history is touched on below, especially the treatment of many of the pictures by Charles O’Neil in the late 1840s and by Martin de Wild in the 1930s. See also Colin Thompson, Pictures for Scotland. The National Gallery of Scotland and its collection: a study of changing attitude to painting since the 1820s, 1972, p.44; Emily L. Moore and Andrew Smith (eds), The Torrie Collection, Talbot Rice Gallery, 2017.

2. The Royal Institution, 1819-59

The Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Scotland was founded in 1819 and received its royal charter in 1827. It held loan exhibitions of old and modern masters, somewhat along the lines of the British Institution in London. From 1826 the Institution was housed in new purpose-built galleries (now housing the Royal Scottish Academy). Also from 1826, the Institution began to build up a collection of paintings that eventually formed the nucleus of the holdings of the National Gallery of Scotland (the paintings mentioned here now belong to the Gallery). For a history of the Institution, see Colin Thompson, Pictures for Scotland, 1972, pp.20-39.

In maintaining the collection the choice lay between seeking the services of a local firm of carvers and gilders who would also restore pictures, or of an artist or picture dealer who had taken up restoration. Early in the Royal Institution’s history, the Edinburgh carver and gilder, John Fraser, received a modest payment for ‘repairing pictures’, in March 1826 (National Records of Scotland, NG3/5/20/8). However, it was to the leading Edinburgh framemakers and picture restorers, William Chalmers & Son, that the Institution turned for care of the pictures lent to its annual exhibitions and for framing and restoration of pictures in its own collection, so much so that from June 1829 the Chalmers business, already picture cleaners to the Scottish Academy, was authorised to adopt the title, ‘Picture Cleaners to the Royal Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Scotland’ (NG3/1/1, minute book, p.255, information from Helen Smailes; see also NG3/4/11/14 for the business’s letter of application). For Chalmers & Son, see British picture framemakers - C.

Chalmers framed an early acquisition, the Jacopo Bassano workshop Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple for £6.9s in 1826 and also cleaned and varnished the picture for £1.11s.6d, a charge which would indicate surface cleaning rather than varnish removal (NG3/5/15/22). Rather more challenging was a gift to the Institution, Jacob More’s large Mount Vesuvius, which Chalmers described as ‘a more arduous task’ than anticipated, involving filling up ‘no less than 280 holes in the painting’, at a cost of £7 in 1829 (NG3/4/11/15, NG3/5/24/6). There was ongoing occasional work.

In 1836 a new manager for the collection, Charles Heath Wilson, called on Chalmers for a series of modest housekeeping repairs, largely varnishing work, costing £11.6s.6d (NG3/5/38/6). In 1840, Chalmers cleaned and treated for worm a ‘Titian’ Venus and Adonis for £3.7s (NG3/5/41/22). When the Chalmers business closed later that year, not long before the death of William Chalmers (?1756-1842), the Royal Institution had to turn elsewhere. It employed the artist and picture restorer, George William Novice, in December 1840 to clean, restore and varnish Bacchus and Ariadne, probably the panel painting now described as Netherlandish (inv.78), at a cost of £10, a charge indicating considerable work (NG3/5/41/43). For Novice, see British picture restorers - N.

There were occasional damages to pictures in exhibitions or in the Institution’s collection (NG3/1/1, pp.451-2, 458-8). When in 1846 one of the major works in the collection, Gian Battista Tiepolo’s large Finding of Moses, was ‘seriously injured’ (NG3/1/1, p.458), estimates for its repair were supplied by three restorers: George William Novice at £7 for repairs excluding lining, Bruce & Macdonald, carvers and gilders, at £20 but including lining (NG3/4/22/4, 5), and Charles O’Neil, a London dealer who was in Edinburgh to value the Torrie collection, who offered to repair the painting at his own expense. O’Neil had in 1834 donated a ‘Ribera’ Martyrdom of St Sebastian to the Royal Institution (NG3/4/15/6; inv.84). His offer to repair the Tiepolo was accepted but with the lining work being done by the Edinburgh restorer, James Walker for £12 (NG3/2/1, NG3/5/50/31). Walker went on to repair the Royal Institution’s large modern copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration for £13 in 1847 (NG3/5/50/31). O’Neil’s gesture appears to have paid off handsomely since in February 1848 he was paid the considerable sum of £154 for lining and cleaning 22 pictures from the Torrie collection, the cost being shared with the Board of Manufactures, and in June that year a further £85 for lining and cleaning the three great Genoese Van Dycks in the collection (NG1/1/38, pp.317- 9, 323, 339; NG3/2/1). For O’Neil and Walker, see British picture restorers.

There was an occasional need to restore sculpture and works on paper. In 1827 the Edinburgh sculptors and marble cutters, Wallace & Whyte, worked on a statue of Lord Erskine and on casts of the Elgin marbles, possibly those supplied by Matthew Mazzoni to the Board of Manufacturers for the Trustees’ Academy (NG3/5/21/26). This business advertised in 1827 that it would contract for the furnishing of lodgings with marbles, for monuments, coats of arms, founts, and sculpture work of any kind in marble or freestone (National Records of Scotland, GD113/5/387); it went on to repair and clean marbles etc in the Torrie collection in 1846/7 (NG3/4/22/18/2). A large drawing by Hugh William Williams was cleaned and pasted into its frame by Chalmers & Son in 1834 and drawings by Guercino were repaired in 1843 by the Edinburgh bookbinders and stationers, Orrock & Romanes (NG3/5/36, NG3/5/46). For Orrock & Romanes, see Scottish Book Trade Index - National Library of Scotland.

In 1859 the Royal Institution’s collection was put on public display in the newly built National Gallery of Scotland, together with pictures from the Torrie collection.

The above account, first published in March 2018, draws on records in the National Records of Scotland: the Board of Manufactures, NG1/1 minute books, and the Royal Institution, NG3/1 minute book, NG3/2 cash book, NG3/3 letter book (copy letters out), NG3/4 correspondence (letters in), NG3/5 bills, accounts etc.

3. The National Gallery of Scotland, 1859-1914, and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1889-1914

The National Gallery had by necessity a close working relationship with the Royal Scottish Academy with which it shared a building and, in part, a collection. The Gallery’s early curators were required to be artists who were Academicians. The curatorship was not a full-time post, ‘the duties being light’ according to one commentator (W.M. Gilbert, ‘Robert Gibb, R.S.A.’, Art Journal, 1897, p.28). The National Gallery and, later, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery were administered by the Board of Manufactures until 1907. Picture restoration was not without controversy on occasion. This may have led the board to take a cautious approach, preferring occasional preventative measures, and only intervening when unavoidable. As earlier in the century, the choice of restorer lay between employing an artist or a firm of carvers and gilders or on one occasion house decorators.

The first curator was the landscape and historical painter, William Borthwick Johnstone, RSA (1804-68), appointed in February 1858. A report on certain pictures was prepared for him by the portrait painter and picture restorer, James Douglas (1810-88) in February the following year, a month before the Gallery formally opened (NG6/7/4/2). Douglas recommended that a split panel, Simon Kick’s Soldiers at Cards, should be ‘buttoned on the back’. The panel, then attributed to Jan Le Ducq, formed part of the Torrie collection. Douglas features in the Royal Scottish Academy minutes, as ‘the picture cleaner employed by the National Gallery’, when he lined and restored John Graham’s large canvas, The Disobedient Prophet, for the Academy for £12 on acquisition in 1859 (RSA minutes, 7 and 18 April 1859, information from Robin H. Rodger). Other pictures were relined or revarnished for the National Gallery. John Thomson’s Bruce’s Castle of Turnberry, painted for the Royal Institution in 1828, was treated by filling and retouching over the cracks according to one observer, who wrote presciently that this restoration was unlikely to be successful for more than a few years, placing the blame on the ‘too free use of magilp and asphaltum’ employed by artists to make a good first appearance (The Scotsman, 2 April 1859). Other 19th-century pictures were suffering from cracking, according to Johnstone’s annual reports in 1862 and 1863. James Stark’s small panel, Gowbarrow Park, had to be restored in 1864 and William Lizars’ much cracked panel, A Scotch Wedding in 1866 (NG6/1/3). For Johnstone, see Galastro 2018 in Sources below. For Douglas, see www.douglashistory.co.uk/history/james_douglas2.htm.

Regulations for day-to-day care of the collection were formulated in 1861. The attendants were restricted to dusting pictures and wiping or rubbing the picture surface with cotton or a silk handkerchief excepting in the case of the varnish on a picture chilling and then only with the personal superintendence of Johnstone as curator (NG6/3/1, pp.97-101). Occasionally problem pictures were glazed for protection. John Taylor & Son supplied glass for this purpose in 1860 (NG1/1/42, 4 June 1860). This business continued to provide services towards the maintenance of the Gallery’s furnishings and fittings over the next 60 years. For Taylor & Son, see British artists' suppliers - T.

An unusual responsibility was the Tassie gems, a vast collection of more than 20,000 items, mainly moulds and impressions of gems, but also coins and medals, from the collection of James Tassie, 18th-century master of medallion portraits in paste. It was bequeathed by his nephew, William Tassie in 1860. The seal engraver, Henry Laing (1803-83), once apprenticed to William Tassie, was brought in to clean the collection, which was in a very dirty state. He was paid 10 shillings a day and his daughter was to assist him at a rate of about 12 shillings a week. The work cost £16.14s in total (NG1/1/42, 12 & 26 March, 28 May 1861). The collection is now with the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Johnstone was succeeded as curator in 1868 by another artist, the history painter and antiquarian, James Drummond, RSA (1816-77). In his annual report in 1871 he drew attention to the state of William Etty’s large and bituminous Judith and Holofernes triptych, owned by the Royal Scottish Academy, while claiming that the works of art belonging to the Board of Manufactures were in good condition and those in the Torrie collection were in excellent condition, as were the modern Scottish pictures deposited by the Royal Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts (NG6/7/9/2). In 1872 and 1873 he drew attention to cracking in Horatio McCulloch’s recently acquired Lowland River (NG6/1/3), a picture which continued to give trouble. James Douglas continued to be employed to restore pictures, in particular a loan from Lord Clinton, Guido Reni’s Virgin and Child, which was repaired in 1872 (NG6/1/3, NG6/7/32). This was the year that Douglas moved south to Surrey and he is not found again as a picture restorer in Edinburgh. In 1874 Drummond himself was to make some repairs to Edwin Landseer’s damaged Rent-day in the Wilderness (NG1/1/45, pp.128-9) and in 1876 Bonnar & Carfrae were paid for varnishing pictures (NG1/7/16). These Edinburgh house painters, gilders and decorators occasionally worked on pictures for the National Gallery over the next few years until the partnership was dissolved in 1884 (see below).

Drummond was followed as curator in 1877 by another artist, William Fettes Douglas, RSA (1822-91), who held the position until 1882, when he was elected President of the Royal Scottish Academy. On becoming curator he prepared an interim report on the condition of the Gallery’s collection (NG6/7/9/6). He found that the old masters were generally in a sound and satisfactory condition, as were pictures painted within the last 20 years. On the other hand works executed during the previous 40 years were in ‘a more or less shakey condition’, in particular George Harvey’s Columbus (inv.80), where the materials with which the picture was executed were ‘running into distortion’; this bituminous picture was subsequently written off. He drew attention to the cracking in Henry Howard’s Venus Carrying off Ascanius, a picture that remains cracked to this day. The National Gallery in London faced similar problems with 19th-century bituminous British paintings. Douglas also drew attention to Gainsborough’s full length Mrs Graham as another picture suffering from cracking which would benefit from relining.

The Gallery’s Arrangement Committee, appointed by the trustees to look at matters in detail, was cautious in instigating restoration work (NG1/1/46, p.159, for example). The Committee was more willing to experiment with preventative measures such as protecting large pictures from direct sunlight by movable silk curtains, starting with John Graham’s The Disobedient Prophet in 1879 (Royal Scottish Academy). The following year other works belonging to the Academy were so protected, five by William Etty and also David Roberts’s View of Rome, the curtains being made by John Brydon & Sons (NG1/1/46, pp.273, 340). In 1881 Brydon & Sons supplied movable shades or curtains to the Gallery’s cupolas to cut out sunlight at source, apparently at a cost of £85.14s (NG1/1/46, p.382, NG1/7/17).

Bonnar & Carfrae were paid £3.8s for repairing pictures in 1880 and the very significant sum of £200 for renewing, reducing and repairing frames in the National Gallery and the Academy, 1881-2 (NG1/7/17, p.108). The idea of reducing frames in size was partly designed to create more space for hanging pictures (NG1/1/46, p.273).

The animal painter, Gourlay Steell, RSA (1819-94), served as curator from 1882 until his death in 1894. The Gallery had long been cautious about treating McCulloch’s badly cracked Lowland River but the picture was reportedly successfully restored following a determined approach by the donor’s nephew in 1887, offering to pay for its restoration (NG1/1/48, p.486, NG1/1/49, p.91). Picture cleaning was rarely without controversy. In 1889 a well-informed but anonymous correspondent, describing himself as an old habitué of the Gallery, recommended that a logbook recording picture restoration should be kept for future reference (The Scotsman, 19 July 1889). He thought O’Neil’s treatment forty years previously of the Van Dycks (see section 2 above) had been deadening and that David Teniers’ panel in the Torrie collection, Peasants playing Skittles, had lost its clear silvery tone. He claimed that Watteau’s Fête Champêtre had been excessively rubbed in cleaning so revealing the artist’s first pose for the standing cavalier (this picture had been bequeathed in 1861; its paint surface is now described as unusually well preserved). Other unsympathetically treated pictures, he thought, included Gainsborough’s Mrs Graham, McCulloch’s Lowland River and Alexander Nasmyth’s Stirling Castle. His letter encouraged another anonymous correspondent to claim that it was not necessarily the case that the Royal Scottish Academicians appointed as curators ‘understood how to properly preserve and restore pictures’ (The Scotsman, 23 July 1889).

The restorer now used for routine work on the collections was Doig & McKechnie (from 1895 Doig, Wilson & Wheatley), Edinburgh picture dealers, carvers and gilders, picture restorers and printsellers, for whom see British picture framemakers - D (where their earlier work for one of the board’s trustees, Lord Lothian, is described). They were paid 10s in 1885 for modest repairs to pictures attributed to De Heem (NG1/7/17, p.224). They restored David Scott’s Paracelsus Lecturing on the Elixir Vitae on acquisition in 1887 and Horatio McCulloch’s accidentally damaged Landscape, Evening, and two small genre subjects by Alexander Carse in 1888 (NG1/1/48, p.430; NG1/1/49, pp.177-8, 192, 210). At the same time Doig & McKechnie provided glass to protect a few vulnerable pictures (NG1/1/48, p.455; NG1/1/49, p.189; NG1/1/50, p.410; NG1/7/18, pp.102, 263). They continued to work for the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery, being paid for repairing and glazing unspecified pictures and frames, 1888-1905 and subsequently (NG1/7/18, accounts; NG1/37/1-3, cash books). Doig also worked for the Royal Scottish Academy.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1882 and opened in a purpose-built gallery on Queen Street in 1889, accommodation which it shared with the Museum of Antiquities and, until 1907, the Royal Geographical Society. The first curator, the energetic antiquarian and art critic, John Miller Gray (1850-94), held office from 1884 until his early death ten years later. In 1888 in the run up to the opening, Gray proposed that certain portraits should be relined or restored (NG1/1/49, p.128), specifically six portraits belonging to the Museum of Antiquities and three full-lengths of George II, George III and Queen Charlotte recently acquired for the Portrait Gallery, which it was proposed to send to Doig & McKechnie. In 1889 various plaster busts were repaired by Leopoldo Arrighi, who also made casts from Tassie medallions (NG1/7/17), while Moxon & Carfrae, successor business to Bonnar & Carfrae, were paid for bronzing busts at the Portrait Gallery in 1890 (NG1/7/18). Also in March 1890 preparations were made for fitting out the upper galleries, with estimates from several businesses: Moxon & Carfrae for washing and painting busts from the antique, Doig & McKechnie for more than 400 stained pine frames with bronze gilt mounts for display of engravings from the Watson and other collections, and R. Shillinglaw & Son for cabinets, portfolios and pigeon-hole cases (NG1/1/50, pp.91-2). Both Moxon & Carfrae and Shillinglaw carried out other work on the new building (see Scottish National Portrait Gallery - Joe Rock's Research Pages). For Arrighi, see British bronze sculpture founders and plaster figure makers - A. For the Portrait Gallery, see Duncan Thomson, A History of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2011.

The reforms of the 1890s: At the request of the Board of Manufactures, a report was prepared in 1893 on the National Gallery’s collection and display (Report by National Gallery Committee, January 1894, example at NG6/7/16/4). The majority report, by Sir George Reid, PRSA, and John Ritchie Findlay, owner of The Scotsman newspaper, noted how some paintings in the collection, owing to the unsound technical methods employed by the artists, were in a more or less decayed state, in part attributing this deterioration to the overheating of the galleries in the past, from the use of gaslight and from dust and smoke. The committee recommended that decayed pictures, together with copies and other doubtful works should be removed from display to enhance the exhibition of paintings of greater value. Further, the use of gaslight should be discontinued, the temperature in the galleries needed to be better regulated and carpeting discontinued. Small marbles, bronzes and wax models needed to be displayed in cases and the more valuable pictures protected by glass. For an account of the debates concerning gas lighting with an illustration showing gas lights at the National Gallery, see Swinney 1999 in Sources below.

The Edinburgh painter of military scenes, Robert Gibb, RSA (1845-1932), was appointed in 1895 as curator, the youngest to date, and continued in post until 1907. The changes recommended by the 1894 report were put into effect in 1896-7. The collection was thinned out, the carpeting replaced by a parquet floor and the galleries redecorated and rehung, re-opening in May 1897 (The Scotsman, 8 May 1897). The pictures were washed with tepid water and dried with a silken cloth, and ‘every picture of any consequence’ was glazed, according to The Scotsman. Robert Gibb later recalled that the pictures had been inspected with a view to their being cleaned, where necessary, and varnished (Report, 1903, para. 582, see below). Doig, Wilson & Wheatley (see above) were paid more than £146 for repairing and renovating pictures in 1897, their largest charge in many years (NG1/37/2). Such was the extent of work that another leading Edinburgh firm, Aitken Dott & Son, was brought in, receiving more than £182 for work on the collection and a further £39.5s for cleaning and repairing pictures belonging to the Royal Scottish Academy. The following year Doig, Wilson & Wheatley received £6 for renovating and repairing Henry Raeburn’s recently acquired Mrs Campbell of Ballimore (NG1/37/2). For Aitken Dott & Son, see British picture framemakers - D.

Another picture restorer, the Edinburgh artist, Charles Halkerston (1828-99), was paid for repairing Allan Ramsay’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, for £4.11s in 1891 and restored three portraits for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1893, James IV and James V for £6.6s and the recently acquired anonymous Alexander Robertson of Struan (‘The Poet Chief) for £2.17s.6d (NG1/1/50, p.231, NG1/37/1). He also treated George Harvey’s large Quitting the Manse for the National Gallery in 1898 (NG6/3/2, p.28). This picture, then fifty years old, was suffering from bituminous cracking which is visible to this day. For Halkerston, see British picture restorers - H. Halkerston was the great-uncle of Harry Woolford (see below).

Halkerston had been approached by the Royal Scottish Academy as early as 1889. He treated various of the Academy’s pictures which now belong to the National Gallery including ‘slightly cleaning, moistening and varnishing’ the three large paintings which make up William Etty’s Judith triptych, for which he was paid £15.15s in 1891, with similar work to David Roberts’ View of Rome for £3.10s (RSA vouchers 1891 bundle 3, information from Robin H. Rodger).

After Halkerston’s death, his nephews Henry and Charles Woolford were paid £23.17s for cutting down and repairing two portraits by Henry Raeburn for the National Gallery in 1900, Alexander Bonar and Mrs Alexander Bonar (NG1/37/1); they were cut down because the figures and backgrounds were painted by another hand according to the Gallery’s 1914 catalogue. At some time after 1909 another Raeburn, Robert Montgomery, was also cut down and in 1926 George Reid’s George Hope (Thomson 2011, p.84).

From 1894 the Board of Manufactures published an annual report on the National Galleries of Scotland but the only mention of collection care comes in 1903 when 12 pictures were listed as being protected by glass.

In 1903 a report by a departmental committee into the administration of the Board of Manufactures was published. In evidence to the committee, Gibb had drawn attention to the unsatisfactory conditions of works in store where oil paintings were at risk from the extreme temperature variations and watercolour drawings from dampness (Report, 1903, para. 650). Sir George Reid, a member of the 1893 committee, recorded that the Royal Scottish Academy inspected its pictures on display at the National Gallery annually and took any necessary action to care for them (para. 464). The 1903 report is available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008590958.

A series of reforms ensued. In 1907, the post of curator under the Board of Manufactures was re-designated as director under a board of trustees. The first director was the Scottish art historian and critic, James Caw (1864-1950), who had joined the Scottish National Portrait Gallery as a young man in 1895. He served until 1930 and was knighted in 1931. There is scant mention of picture restoration in the minutes of trustee meetings until 1924 although payments to Doig, Wilson & Wheatley and Aitken Dott & Son continue, for example to Dott in 1910 for unspecified repairs at the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery and in 1912 for ‘general repair work’ at the National Gallery (NG5/10/1, 2). The specialist London firm, Halsey & Davison, was paid £14.3s.6d in 1912 for mounts for the National Gallery (NG5/10/2). Very occasionally sculpture features. When Onslow Ford’s plaster bust of Arthur Balfour was damaged in 1913, Caw was instructed to piece the bust together but to obtain a new cast if necessary. He was also asked to reconsider the fixing of busts in the galleries (Trustees’ minutes, 8 October 1913).

Caw provided access to the collection from 1911 for the Edinburgh chemist, Prof. A.P. Laurie, Principal of Heriot-Watt College and Professor of chemistry to the Royal Academy, to take special photographs and to examine pictures in the years before the First World War (A.P. Laurie, Pictures and Politics. A Book of Reminiscences, 1934, p.103 etc). Laurie’s results feature in his book, The Pigments and Mediums of the Old Masters, published in 1914, where he singled out Watteau’s Fêtes Venitiennes in the National Gallery as his first experiment in “microphotography of brushwork” (The Pigments and Mediums of the Old Masters, 1914, p.176). For Laurie, see British picture restorers - L.

Caw produced a report for Glasgow University on the care of individual pictures in the Hunterian Museum in 1913, with work being carried out by a Belgian refugee restorer, Emile Rombouts, in 1916 (The Scotsman, 15 January 1926).

The above account draws on Board of Manufactures records in the National Records of Scotland, NG1/1 minute books to 1907, NG1/7 copy annual reports and accounts to 1894, and published reports 1894-1907, NG1/37 cash books 1891-1905, NG6/1/3 curators annual reports 1860-73, NG6/3 Board orders concerning National Gallery 1851-1907, NG6/7 miscellaneous papers 1857-94. For the period since 1907, see National Records of Scotland, NG5/10 letter books 1908-27, and National Gallery of Scotland archive, Trustees minutes.

4. The 1920s and 1930s and the role of Stanley Cursiter

During the First World War the more valuable pictures from the collection were stored in the basement of the Royal Scottish Academy. The Portrait Gallery had already closed in March 1914, for fireproofing work and remained closed until 1922, when in the face of refusal from the Treasury to provide funds the trustees expressed their willingness to reopen even with the old steam heating system where it was ‘not uncommon during the winter months to find the glass of pictures steamed, and the surface of unglazed pictures wet with condensed moisture’ (Thomson 2011 p.36), a problem that was partly resolved by a move to hot water radiators.

The National Gallery’s approach to picture restoration moved away from employing one of the long-established Edinburgh firms of carvers and gilders to obtaining the services of a specialist picture restorer, whether in London, The Hague (highly original as an approach) or Edinburgh (for British portraits in the 1930s).

Quite how far large post-war payments to Aitken Dott & Son and Doig, Wilson & Wheatley in March 1919 and July 1920 related to work on restoring the collection remains to be investigated (NG5/10/8). Picture restoration was first noted in trustee meeting minutes in 1924 and did not feature in published annual reports until 1928. Goya’s rather damaged painted tapestry cartoon, El medico, was treated by W. Holder & Sons, restorers to the National Gallery in London, in 1923-4 at a cost of £48.14s (Trustees’ minutes, 16 January 1924; NG5/10/10). Holder’s also revarnished etc a picture by Poussin for £20 and subsequently cleaned a newly acquired Emilian Madonna and Child with Saints for £12.12s (inv.1634, then attr. Scaletti, see NG5/10/10). For Holder’s, see British picture restorers - H.

The artist, Stanley Cursiter, RSA (1887-1976), was appointed keeper of the National Galleries of Scotland in August 1925, later serving as director, 1930-48. Cursiter was a remarkable and ingenious man, who faced up to current problems and identified future needs, including promoting the idea of a gallery of modern art and the need for air conditioning. There was a fire in an adjacent building to the Portrait Gallery in 1927 and Cursiter brought his technical ability to the subsequent remodelling of the Gallery, including improvements to the heating and ventilation system, so achieving some control over humidity levels, according to his later autobiography (Looking Back: A Book of Reminiscences, 1974, p.21).

Cursiter encouraged James Caw to get certain pictures restored, using the Gallery’s boardroom as a temporary restoration workshop, according to his autobiography (Looking Back, p.21). The Edinburgh firm, Doig, Wilson & Wheatley, long used by the Gallery, was called on to reline Gainsborough’s full-length Mrs Graham on the premises in 1926, following inspection by the firm’s Thomas Wilson. The work was not deemed satisfactory and it may be that this was the large picture where an accident with a relining iron in the paste lining process led to damage which Cusiter himself chose to repair (Looking Back, pp.22-3). George Morrill of the London firm, William Morrill & Son, specialist liners to the London National Gallery, was invited to examine the picture and then relined it in winter 1927-8. However, Doig, Wilson & Wheatley did successfully line another large picture, Jacopo Bassano’s large Adoration of the Kings in 1927. The firm also paste lined Jacob van Ruisdael’s Banks of a River in 1929 although Cursiter later reported that the treatment had not been altogether successful (National Gallery of Scotland archive, De Wild file, ‘Memorandum on the position with regard to the restoration of the Torrie Bequest pictures’, May 1938). See Trustees’ minutes, 16 March, 19 October 1927, 18 January 1928, 16 January 1929. For Morrill, see British picture restorers - M.

Stanley Cursiter and Martin de Wild: Cursiter’s mixed experience with paste lining led him to seek ‘better and more scientific methods’ (Looking Back, p.22) and so, it would seem, to investigate the wax lining process, which had been pioneered in Holland. He had seen a large group portrait by Frans Hals at Haarlem, which had been cleaned by the De Wild family of picture restorers (Looking Back, p.22). It may be that Prof. A.P. Laurie, who was known to James Caw (see above), encouraged the Gallery to get in touch directly with the De Wilds, whose work he had illustrated in an article in 1925 (‘The preservation and cleaning of pictures’, Connoisseur, vol.73, 1925, pp.131-7). It was the son, Martin de Wild (1899-1969), who responded to the National Gallery’s approach in October 1926. He was invited to Edinburgh the following spring to inspect the condition of Dutch pictures in the collection (Trustees’ minutes, 20 October 1926, 15 June 1927; James Caw, The Scotsman, 21 August 1928). In his report in May 1927 on 75 Dutch and Flemish paintings De Wild put forward certain overarching ideas about picture restoration and identified what work would be advisable on individual pictures (National Gallery of Scotland archive, De Wild file). This was the beginning of an enduring and productive professional relationship. Over the years De Wild treated many works for the Gallery, including paintings by Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer. For De Wild, see British picture restorers - D.

De Wild’s first great success came in 1928. At his suggestion a panel painting by Frans Hals was x-rayed at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, revealing a partly over-painted image which matched an early engraving. He then cleaned the picture at Knoedler’s in London in July 1928 in front of both Caw and Cursiter, leading to its identification as Hals’s long-lost Verdonck, thanks, he said, to a diagnosis made by purely scientific methods. The process was treated as an illustrated case study in his book, The Scientific Examination of Pictures, translated and published in English in 1929.

There was caution in Edinburgh about embracing the Dutch wax lining process. Lord Crawford was consulted in February 1928 as was Sir Charles Holmes; Crawford was former chairman of trustees and Holmes director at the National Gallery in London. Crawford provided Caw with a letter recommending the De Wilds, claiming, ‘The father [Derix] I may say is a very remarkable man, the son [Martin] still being more of the abstract scientist’ (RKD, Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, copy letter, information from Michiel Franken). Crawford had been using the De Wilds for his own collection from as early as 1922. In the event it was decided not to send Jacob van Ruysdael’s Landscape to Holland for treatment (Trustees’ Minutes, 12 March 1928). But both Caw and Cursiter visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in April 1929, along with W.G. Constable from the London National Gallery, to examine the wax relining process, and in particular the lining by Willem Greebe at the Rijksmuseum of a picture from the Edinburgh collection, Pieter van Bloemen’s Roman Ruins (inv.1014, then attr. Asselijn; Trustees’ minutes, 19 June 1929; information from Esther van Duijn on Greebe’s role). They went on to inspect the wax lining process as carried out by Martin de Wild.

Martin de Wild worked on the collection over the next ten years, generally charging between £20 and £80 a picture. In 1929 he cleaned and restored Rembrandt’s A Woman in Bed, then known as Hendrickje Stoffels, at Knoedler’s (RKD, letters, 1 February, 14, 15 March 1929, see https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/22236, technical documentation). He gave it a toned varnish so that the difference after cleaning would ‘not be too striking at the same time giving a sufficient effect’. Cursiter even provided a sample of the tone he was seeking (letter, 14 March 1929). In 1932 at the time of an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, De Wild again treated the picture, removing the canvas from the supporting panel and relining and revarnishing with ‘only the slightest tone in the varnish’ (RKD, letter, 30 September 1932; full report by Cursiter; The Scotsman, 1 August 1933). Later De Wild compared his treatment to the rather raw result of the London National Gallery’s cleaning of Velazquez’s full-length Philip IV, asking, ‘What would have happened if Hendrickje did not have a soothing toned varnish’ and referring to ‘a certain policy of cleaning, which we both have always followed’. How far De Wild used a toned varnish on Edinburgh pictures remains to be established. He claimed in 1937 that ‘Pictures as a rule should be treated such that they have in no way a “cleaned” appearance when rehung and the less is said about them the better.’

In the mid-1930s Cursiter had pictures shipped from Leith to Rotterdam each year for De Wild to treat at The Hague. The following account is substantially based on their exchanges, which were necessarily by letter (NG6/7/24). On occasion they discussed approaches to restoration. In August 1934 Cursiter told him, ‘I always have a feeling at the back of my mind that if a picture is four hundred years old it should retain something of the character which its age should give it. For instance, with my Botticelli, the few fragments of paint which are missing along the top edge and the slight damage in the darks of the tunic do not to my mind detract from the picture but rather add to it in suggesting the picture’s age’. Sadly both Cursiter and De Wild were mistaken about this Portrait of a Young Man, a recent purchase (Gallery archive, inv.1792 file, De Wild report). Pigment analysis by Helmut Ruhemann in 1951 led to the conclusion that the picture was a fairly recent copy of an original in the Louvre (Hugh Brigstocke, Italian and Spanish Paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, 1993, p.42; The Scotsman, 18 and 23 May 2005).

De Wild reported very fully on his progress on the Vermeer, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, in three letters to Cursiter in the course of November 1935. ‘The varnish is of a rather tough structure, but dissolves slowly in a very lenient solvent, so that the whole layer can be removed without any aggressive action to the paint. There are in the top figure various tonalities, that were completely hidden and which are now revealed’, adding that the signature was absolutely genuine (6 November). ‘So far about one half of the picture is cleaned, namely the left side and the figure come out in a beautiful manner with many details in the colour scheme... Have you ever noticed that the left hand of Christ shows a pentamenti on the fore finger?’ (10 November). ‘I have now finished the cleaning of the Vermeer and have started to restore the missing fragments, which you will notice on the enclosed reproduction. Of course these are not the only spots to be retouched, here and there also very small scratches occur like there are on any old picture but on a whole the painting is in a very good state... The various pentamenti are not much disturbing, although I am covering a few just slightly, that they do not show too much but are still visible.’ (17 November).

De Wild was a proponent of wax-resin linings, a method much used in the Netherlands. It was embraced at the National Gallery of Scotland and more cautiously at the London National Gallery in the 1930s. Cursiter published an article with Dr Harold Plenderleith from the British Museum on wax relining in 1934 in Technical Studies in the Field of the Fine Arts (vol.3, pp.90-113). In 1936 Cursiter and De Wild discussed research on relining mediums using wax and resin in different proportions (NG6/7/24). The two men published several articles on wax relining in Technical Studies, most particularly in 1937, with a series of 13 illustrations of Hendrick ten Oever’s Canal Landscape with Figures Bathing, a picture from the Torrie collection that De Wild had lined using a 40% resin, 60% bees wax mixture (vol.5, pp.157-78). A further article in 1939 illustrated the use of an electric tool, described as a dentist’s fraiser, in removing the old lining from another Torrie picture, Della Vecchia’s Young Noble and Lady (vol.7, p.191).

Unlike most commercial restorers of his day, De Wild was well equipped to employ scientific techniques in the examination of pictures. In 1930 he used x-rays and chemical analysis to confirm that The Haybinders, purchased as by Jean François Millet in 1924, was not by the artist and as a result it was returned to the dealer from whom it had been acquired (NG5/2/35, report, 14 July 1930; The Times, 4 February 1935, letter to editor from Cursiter). De Wild carried out a scientific examination in 1931 that downgraded two other recent acquisitions, Still Life: Souvenirs, purchased as by Edouard Manet but now described as by an imitator and The Entombment, then called Eugene Delacroix but now catalogued as French 19th century (inv.1618, 1667; see NG6/7/24, De Wild invoice, 7 September 1931). As a result both works were excluded from the next edition of the Gallery’s catalogue, published in 1936.

These were not the only pictures subject to scrutiny. That De Wild failed to spot the fake Botticelli has already been mentioned. On a happier note, at the request of the collector, Alexander Maitland, a lender to the Gallery, Cursiter arranged for Van Gogh’s Orchard in Blossom to be sent to De Wild for testing in 1937, before Maitland would decide on purchasing the picture. ‘Van Gogh Genuine Age Tests Entirely Convincing’, De Wild telegraphed in June that year and the picture eventually came to the Gallery as part of the Maitland gift in 1960 (NG6/7/24). At some stage De Wild also verified the age of a paint sample from Van Gogh’s Olive Trees (Stanley Cursiter, The Scotsman, 28 February 1949). Cursiter’s nervousness was understandable in the light of the trial of Otto Wacker in Germany in 1932 for faking Van Gogh’s work, a trial at which De Wild played a key part in presenting scientific evidence relating to the pigments used.

Many of the pictures treated by De Wild were from the Torrie collection, long on loan to the Gallery. In 1931 De Wild’s treatment of two pictures in the collection, described as by Rembrandt, a panel Landscape (inv.69) and a canvas Wooded Scene (inv.68), led to their reattribution to Hercules Seghers and to Jan Lievens respectively (The Scotsman, 25 July 1931; see also Duncan Macmillan, A Catalogue of the Torrie Collection, 2004, pp.21, 39).

A list of further Torrie pictures needing treatment was drawn up in 1934 (NG6/7/23). The four pictures requiring immediate attention, the Veronese studio Venus and Adonis, Van de Velde’s Boats in a Calm, Hobbema’s Woody Landscape and Teniers’ Peasants playing at Skittles, cost £200 to restore (NG6/7/24). They were the subject of detailed treatment reports by De Wild. The two canvases were relined in wax and both panels cradled or re-cradled. De Wild described cradling as ‘a safe remedy against further movement of the wood’ (the accepted wisdom of the day). An x-ray of the Hobbema revealed with remarkable clarity that part of the picture had been painted over an earlier still life composition. A further seven Torrie pictures were sent over to Holland in 1935, two more in 1936, four in 1937 and eight in 1938, before the threat of war put an end to this remarkable programme. In the 1937 consignment De Wild found that both Adam Frans van der Meulen’s A Cavalcade and a Dutch Seapiece (inv.27) had previously been relined in Edinburgh in 1847, according to old inscriptions, work which must have been done by or for Charles O’Neil for the Royal Institution (see section 2). Almost all the Torrie pictures were returned to Edinburgh University in 1954 and 1983.

If few of the Torrie pictures are still with the National Gallery, various paintings from another collection that De Wild worked on in the 1930s, the Bridgewater House pictures, came to the Gallery on loan from the Duke of Sutherland in 1945/46. These include the set of Poussin Sacraments which De Wild treated in 1934-5 and Rembrandt’s Young Woman with Flowers in her Hair, among eight pictures which he restored in 1937-8 (NG6/7/24). De Wild corresponded with Cursiter in 1935 about Titian’s two great canvases, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, which had been wax lined and cleaned by S. Kennedy North only two years previously. He observed that large blisters had appeared between the original and lining canvases, leading to distortions in the paint surface, which he discussed with Francis Thompson of Chatsworth, curatorial adviser for the Bridgewater pictures (NG6/7/24, 6 November 1935, 3 January 1936). De Wild continued to work on the collection as late as the 1960s (see section 5; see also Van Duijn 2003 in Sources below).

De Wild kept in touch with Cursiter during and after the Second World War and visited Edinburgh in 1946 (NG6/7/25).

Other pre-war restoration work and preventative care: De Wild was not the only restorer employed by Cursiter in the 1930s. Doig, Wilson & Wheatley wax lined the central canvas of William Etty’s large Judith and Holofernes triptych under Cursiter’s supervision in 1932 (Trustees’ minutes, 21 March 1932) and treated three pictures from the Torrie collection in 1936: two ruin scenes attributed to Giovanni Ghisolfi and Adam Pynacker’s Forest Glade (National Gallery of Scotland archive, De Wild file, ‘Torrie Bequest. Pictures requiring immediate attention’).This was perhaps the last significant restoration work given to one of the traditional commercial firms in Edinburgh.

Increasingly Cursiter turned to the Edinburgh-born artist, Harry Woolford (1905-99), great-nephew of Charles Halkerston (see above). Woolford worked as a restorer for the National Galleries as well as for many leading private and institutional collections. For Woolford, see British picture restorers - W; see Sources below for his notebooks.

At the National Galleries Woolford mainly treated British pictures, especially portraits (Woolford notebook, NGSC A1/3). For the National Gallery in 1933 he lined David Martin’s Lady Steuart of Allanton and cleaned and retouched William Allan’s The Black Dwarf. In 1935 he treated eleven pictures among which Jacopo Tintoretto’s Head of a Bearded Man was lined and restored, in 1936 eight pictures including double lining J.T. Seton’s William Fullerton and Capt. Ninian Lowis, in 1937 four pictures including an unidentified Allan Ramsay portrait, in 1938 five pictures and in 1939 twelve pictures including cleaning and restoring Henry Raeburn’s Mrs Scott Moncrieff. For the Portrait Gallery, among other pictures, in 1933 he removed the varnish and revarnished the Van Dyck studio/copy full-lengths, King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria and in 1934 lined and surface cleaned Raeburn’s Niel Gow. Woolford’s subsequent work is discussed in section 5.

Atmospheric conditions were increasingly a matter of concern for public collections, including the National Gallery of Scotland. Cursiter attended a museum conference on the subject in London in the early 1930s. Always an ingenious man, he contributed actively to discussions with colleagues in London on the effects of humidity on pictures (see Oddy 2001 p.169 in Sources below). At his initiative in 1935, three humidity meters were installed in the National Gallery, revealing an extreme annual variation between 35% and 90%, with the highest readings recorded in autumn (The Scotsman, 7 February 1936; Stanley Cursiter, ‘Control of air in cases and frames’, Technical Studies in the Field of the Fine Arts, vol. 5, 1936, pp.109-16). The damaging sulphur content in the atmosphere was also measured, revealing that the figure was half that of London during the winter although much the same in summer. In warm moist weather in autumn 1938, it was observed how pictures lined with wax resin were much less susceptible to hanging loosely on their stretchers than those lined with a glue or glue paste adhesive, highlighting an advantage of wax as a non-hygroscopic adhesive. Cursiter identified the solution to these problems as controlling temperature and humidity which would come through air-conditioning the Gallery and its store (Annual Report, 1938).

This is the context for the rehousing of Hugo van der Goes’s Trinity altarpiece in air-tight frames in 1935, so achieving stable humidity for the panels, as reported in The Scotsman (7 February 1936) and in an illustrated account in Technical Studies (cited above). Minor restoration of these panels, on loan from the Royal collection, was put in hand under the direction of Kenneth Clark as Surveyor of the King’s Picture.

The above account draws on National Records of Scotland, NG6/7/23-24, De Wild files; National Gallery of Scotland archives: Trustees’ minutes from 1907; published annual reports; De Wild file (‘Report on the state of Dutch pictures by De Wild’); Harry Woolford notebooks (NGSC A1/1-11). See also Van Duijn 2003 in Sources below.

5. A conservation department: The Woolford years, 1940 to 1970

The war years: Harry Woolford was appointed as technical assistant at the National Galleries of Scotland in late 1940 to carry out restoration work for both the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery for the duration of the Second World War, initially at £4 a week (Trustees’ minutes, November 1940). He worked in an attic space at the Portrait Gallery (Duncan Thomson, A History of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2011, pp.38-9).

Woolford’s first major task was to supervise the evacuation of the collections during the war to several large country houses in the Borders (John Dick, ‘Harry Woolford’, obituary,The Scotsman, 11 September 1999). Pictures were stored at Fairnilee, near Galashiels (home of Lady Craigmyle), The Glen (Lord Glenconnar), Manderston, Duns (Major Bailie) and Glen Ormiston near Innerleithen (Lady Thorburn). Pictures were also stored for a time at Leithen Lodge (Sir George Miller-Cunningham) and Winton Castle (Mr Ogilvie), but the conditions at some venues proved unsatisfactory (The Scotsman, 19 July 1945, ‘How Scotland’s Pictures were Safeguarded’).

During the war years, Woolford’s work focused on the national collection. He produced exemplary reports, picture by picture, occasionally with photographs attached (Woolford notebook, A1/4). He usually specified his solvent mix and gave the source of his varnish, including mastic and copal from Winsor & Newton, but fairly early on he specified his mastic as ‘own make’.

A few illustrative examples are given here. For the National Gallery, in 1941 Bernardo Castello’s Adoration of the Shepherds (cleaned using Acetone 50: Turps 50, and retouched, cradle replaced [the picture was then on panel], varnished with mastic and finished with damar). In 1942 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s sketch, The Meeting of Anthony and Cleopatra (obscure and yellow varnish removed using Toluene 50: Meths 50 to reveal paint in good condition except a few edge blemishes; work fumigated with thymol; old lining loose and removed to reveal inscriptions and markings on reverse; ‘normal relining procedure’, using wax 60: resin 40 plus Venice turpentine; revarnished with own make mastic and finished with Winsor & Newton copal).

For the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, in 1942 Mather Brown’s unlined Alexander Wedderburn, Earl of Rosslyn (relined, slightly cleaned, varnished with own make mastic and finished with Winsor & Newton copal) and in 1943 Alphonse Legros’s unlined Thomas Carlyle (‘laid down on new canvas’, restretched on own stretcher, loose paint fixed, revarnished).

The National Gallery remained partly open for much of the war with a series of temporary exhibitions. Towards the close of war Cursiter mounted a display of cleaned pictures, as he explained in The Scotsman (12 April 1945). David Wilkie’s Sheepwashing had had its thick layer of very yellow varnish removed in 1944. The process of cleaning the heavily repainted panel, Bacchus and Ariadne, once attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo, had revealed a Flemish work (inv.78) (very probably the picture cleaned by George Novice a century before). Marcus Gheeraerts’s Tom Derry at the Portrait Gallery, previously thought to represent Viscount Stormont, had had later additions removed, revealing a fine portrait dated 1614

The late 1940s and 1950s: Stanley Cursiter retired in 1948. One of his last acts was to set up a new studio for Harry Woolford in 1947, as appears from his correspondence with De Wild (NG6/7/25). He was succeeded as director by Ellis Waterhouse, 1949-52, followed by David Baxandall until 1970. Woolford was for many years picture restorer at the National Galleries of Scotland. The post was established on a temporary basis after the war and combined with that of Keeper until 1953 (Trustees’ minutes, 5 January 1953).

In 1949 Woolford was given the title Chief Restorer and at this point he seems to have given up most private work. The entries in his record of work for the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery, 1948-66 (Woolford notebook, A1/6), are relatively brief, especially from 1954, and it is probable that his full records survive in individual picture files. Woolford’s work is also listed in appendices to the Gallery’s annual reports from 1949 and in Trustees’ minutes. In employing Woolford, as an artist who became a specialist picture restorer, the National Gallery was in step with practice elsewhere outside London as, for example, in Liverpool.

Woolford’s work for the National Gallery in the late 1940s and 1950s is listed here very selectively. In 1949 cleaning and lining John Constable’s Vale of Dedham and cleaning and relining Raeburn’s Rev. Robert Walker skating. In 1950 cleaning Tiepolo’s Finding of Moses, work done in situ on account of its huge size (it had been lined a century before by James Walker). In 1951 cleaning and relining Veronese’s Mars and Venus, so recovering it from an almost invisible condition, also removing discoloured varnish from two Wilkies, Pitlessie Fair and The Irish Whiskey Still. In 1952 cleaning and repairing Van Dyck’s Lomellini Family and cleaning and relining Ter Bruggen’s Beheading of St John, revealing a signature so changing the attribution from Domenico Fetti. In 1953 treating two full-lengths by Gainsborough: removing deeply discoloured varnish from Mrs Graham and, for the Portrait Gallery wax relining, cleaning and restoring a recent acquisition, John 4th Duke of Argyll. In 1954 removing heavily yellowed varnish and extensive repainting from Zurbaran’s large Immaculate Conception, the first time it had been cleaned since acquisition in 1859. In 1956-7 removing yellow varnish and repaints, and wax-resin lining Velazquez’s recently acquired Old Woman Cooking Eggs, uncovering the date 1618. In 1957 cleaning six pictures by Corot, much obscured by discoloured varnish, including lining four of them. In 1958 cleaning Veronese’s large St Anthony Abbot with Kneeling Donor, part of a fragmented altarpiece, revealing part of a figure of St Michael. In 1959 fixing flaking paint and surface cleaning Turner’s Somer hill, Tunbridge, rather than full cleaning in view of Turner’s technique (Trustees’ minutes, 20 January 1960).

For the Portrait Gallery in the 1950s, Woolford treated many historical portraits including two works by George Romney, Major-Gen. James Stuart in 1956 and John McArthur in 1957, and three works by Raeburn, John Rennie in 1957, Alexander Dalzel in 1958 and Gen. Robert Melville in 1959. Work on the collection at the Portrait Gallery has generally proved more straightforward than on the old masters of the Scottish National Gallery.

Woolford also had responsibility for sculpture and works on paper, which are briefly mentioned here. Several sculptures, both bronze and marble, suffered damage by visitors or in transit, 1949-52. There was an extensive programme over the decades of cleaning prints and drawings, with occasional treatment for mildew, and remounting to standard sizes, as noted summarily in annual reports. It remains to be established who carried out the work and when it was brought in house.

The Gallery’s x-ray equipment was used by Stephen Rees-Jones, radiographer at the Courtauld Institute, to take x-rays from more than 20 pictures in 1959 with valuable results. He also provided training for Gallery staff. He returned in 1970 to supervise the production of complete x-ray mosaics and infra-red images of the Hugo van der Goes Trinity altarpiece panels (Annual Reports, 1959, 1970).

The 1960s: Woolford conducted a rewarding study visit to Italian restoration workshops in Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples in 1960, and visited studios in Holland in 1963, facilitated by Martin de Wild (Trustees’ minutes, 21 June 1960, 18 June 1963). In 1960 Woolford reported on the new vacuum table which he thought would facilitate lining modern paintings but had no clear advantage over normal methods for older works (Trustees’ minutes, 25 October 1960). In 1962 the Gallery’s studio was made available to Martin de Wild to allow him to reline Titian’s Allegory of the Three Ages of Man on loan from the Sutherland collection (Trustees’ minutes, 30 October 1962).

For the National Gallery in the 1960s, Woolford’s work is selectively listed here. In 1960 cleaning, lining and restoring Claude’s newly acquired Apollo and the Muses, revealing a signature and date and a picture in near perfect condition, with another Claude, the Sutherland Moses and the Burning Bush treated the following year (Annual Reports, 1960, 1961). In 1962 cleaning and restoring the Torrie collection Jacob van Ruisdael Banks of a River, uncovering the signature and date 1649. In 1964 cleaning and restoring Jacopo Bassano’s large Adoration of the Kings, last treated in 1927, a lengthy job owing to extensive small damages (Annual Report, 1964). In 1966 cleaning and restoring Rembrandt’s A Woman in Bed, last treated in 1932. In 1967 treating Quinten Massys’s problematic panel, Portrait of a Man, and Andrea del Sarto’s rather damaged panel, the newly acquired Self-portrait (now thought to depict Becuccio Bicchieraio), which proved to be a time consuming task. In contrast, Woolford drew attention to the complete absence of damage, fillings and repaint in Watteau’s Fête Venitiennes (Trustees’ minutes, 16 January 1968). In 1968 William Etty’s problematic outsize Judith and Holofernes, relined in 1932, was mothballed by placing it on a roller (Trustees’ minutes, 25 June 1968).

For the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which opened in 1960, there was relatively little to do at first beyond housekeeping but in the later 1960s modern pictures began to be lined including Ferdinand Leger’s Femme et nature morte in 1967 and Emil Nolde’s Head and Graham Sutherland’s Western Hills in 1968. To these can be added Van Gogh’s Olive Trees in 1970 and Camille Pissarro’s The Marne at Chennevières in 1973 at the Scottish National Gallery (Annual reports; Trustees’ minutes, 25 June 1968).

With Woolford’s retirement in sight, he was asked to examine the restoration work carried out by Ian Hodkinson for the University of Edinburgh (Trustees’ minutes, 31 October 1967). But in 1968, arrangements were made for him to train John Dick, the Gallery’s senior museum assistant, as a restorer (Trustees’ minutes, 25 June 1968). Additional studio space was made available at 17 Ainslie Place in 1969 to accommodate Dick (Trustees’ minutes, 17 June 1969). Woolford retired at the age of 65 in 1970 but indicated his willingness to continue to work half-time thereafter (Trustees’ minutes, 21 October 1969). His successor, John Dick, characterised Woolford in an obituary as ‘a traditionalist in practice and in his materials’.

The above account draws on National Gallery of Scotland archives: Trustees’ minutes from 1907; Harry Woolford notebooks (NGSC A1/4 & 6), as well as published annual reports.

6. The last fifty years

Recent years are not the main focus of this history but are treated here summarily. There have been four directors, Hugh Scrutton (1971-77), Colin Thompson (1977-84), Sir Timothy Clifford (1984-2006) and Sir John Leighton (from 2006). There have been three keepers of conservation, John Dick (until 1999), Michael Gallagher (1999-2005) and Jacqueline Ridge (from 2006). For a profile of Gallagher, see the interview by Sharon McCord, ‘Under the Surface’, Museums Journal, vol.104, 2004, p.20. Lesley Stevenson is senior paintings conservator. Painting conservators have included the late Donald Forbes (1952-2006) (The Scotsman, 2 February 2007). As director, Colin Thompson articulated the Gallery’s approach to the treatment of pictures in ‘Seeing is not Believing’, a publication which accompanied a display in 1982: ‘The modern principle of restoration, which is to restore paintings as nearly as possible to their original appearance, is now so generally accepted that it is surprising to realise that the concept is barely more than fifty years old’.

Many works in the collections were lined in the 1970s and 1980s, as is apparent from successive annual reports. It remains to be ascertained quite how the more cautious approach engendered by the Greenwich conference on lining techniques in 1974 impacted on practice in Edinburgh but it is worth noting that the first mention of strip lining in annual reports occurs that year.

John Dick spent three profitable months in 1978 working under John Brealey at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Annual Report, 1978). Brealey had restored the so-called ‘Ruskin Madonna’, the Verrocchio Virgin adoring the Christ Child, before its acquisition by the National Gallery of Scotland in 1975, so Dick was already aware of his work. Dick later contributed to an initiative involving curators in local authority and other non-national museums, involving one-day seminars in the care and handling of pictures for curators and private owners of important paintings, conducted by the conservation departments of the National Galleries and Glasgow Museum and Art Galleries (Annual Report, 1979). Dick undertook some work for the Royal Scottish Academy in the 1970s and led a team of National Gallery conservators to provide initial help to the staff of Perth Museum and Art Gallery when its stores were flooded in 1993 (information from Robin H. Rodger).

A few works are singled out here as exemplars of conservation work since 1970. Nicolas Poussin’s newly acquired panel, The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, was cleaned on acquisition in 1973, removing the old deeply discoloured varnish and restorations, with a complete x-ray mosaic showing up alterations (Annual Report, 1974). Robert Herdman’s Evening Thoughts was cleaned in 1976, so changing the old attribution, which was based on a false Tom Faed ‘signature’ (Annual Report, 1976). Frederick Church’s large Niagara Falls, a rare American painting in the collection, was cleaned and lined in 1977 after many years in store (Annual Report, 1977). More unusually William Hole’s wall paintings in oil on canvas in the Portrait Gallery’s central courtyard were cleaned in situ in 1984 (and have since been cleaned again). Some information on more recent conservation work can be found online, e.g., Lesley Stevenson, Preparing Guthrie's 'Oban' and Paterson's 'Edinburgh from Craigleith' for display, December 2018.

Increasingly exhibition loans, whether in or out, have placed demands on the conservation department but have also offered opportunities. To take one example, when the loan of Joshua Reynolds’ masterpiece, The Ladies Waldegrave, was agreed in 1984 for the Reynolds exhibition in London and Paris, the yellowed varnish and darkened retouchings led to the picture being cleaned. Despite concerns over the difficulty of treating this artist’s pictures, the varnish proved safe to remove but some of the paint, notably in the crimson curtain, was vulnerable to solvent action and required careful treatment. The frail unlined canvas was given support by stretching a secondary canvas beneath rather than relined (‘The Ladies Waldegrave by Reynolds, just cleaned by John Dick’, National Galleries of Scotland News, autumn 1986).

John Dick ensured that there was time for research in depth on the collection, in particular employing technical examination to understand the painting materials of two leading Scottish portrait painters, Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn (National Galleries of Scotland Review 1991-1993, p.25; see also John Dick, ‘Raeburn’s Methods and Materials’, in Duncan Thomson, Raeburn: The Art of Sir Henry Raeburn 1756-1823, 1997, pp.39-45).

More recently, Benjamin West’s huge unlined canvas, The Death of the Stag, was cleaned and restored by Michael Gallagher, in public in the National Gallery in 2004, and was used as a way of presenting painting conservation to a wider audience (see Michael Gallagher, ‘The artist’s technique and the conservation of the painting’, in Duncan Thomson (ed.), Benjamin West and The Death of the Stag, 2009, pp.20-31). The removal of discoloured natural resin varnish and later repaints covering the entire sky greatly improved the painting’s appearance. Cleaning revealed pinhead losses, the results of frequent rolling and unrolling of this large canvas; cleaning also revealed a pronounced pattern of darkening of the paint following the horizontal warp threads, a phenomenon tackled by careful retouching in a few conspicuous areas.

In 1972 the air conditioning of the National Gallery building meant that protective glass could progressively be removed from pictures. In 1984 the conservation department moved into the former science wing of John Watson’s School, the home of the Gallery of Modern Art, where more extensive premises allowed larger pictures to be treated safely. Storage was moved off site in the 1990s but not without problem. A store at Beaverhall, containing many items from the Eduardo Paolozzi archive was flooded in 2000 but largely rescued through a vacuum freeze-drying programme (Àngels Arribas, ‘Cold Comfort: Flood recovery project of the Eduardo Paolozzi Archive’, The Conservator, no.26, 2002, pp.3-13). Since then the modern stores at Granton, opening in 2002, have proved a great advantage in collection care. Further expansion is planned. The Granton Art Centre is located within the National Museums Collection Centre site. For an online feature, see Crystal Bennes, What’s in store at the National Galleries of Scotland? | Apollo Magazine, 2016.

The National Galleries of Scotland’s Conservation and Care Policy is available online as a PDF.

Sources not cited in full above, in chronological order: Andrew Oddy, ‘The three wise men and the 60:60 rule’, in Andrew Oddy and Sandra Smith (eds), Past Practice – Future Prospect, British Museum Occasional Paper No.145, 2001, pp.167-70.

Geoffrey Swinney, ‘Gas lighting in British museums and galleries, with particular reference to the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol.18, 1999, pp.113-43.

Esther van Duijn, Goltzius, De Wild en Van Bohemen; drie namen, één schilderij. Onderzoek naar de restauratiegeschiedenis van Jupiter & Antiope (1612) van H. Goltzius, naar aanleiding van de restauratie van het schilderij, conservation thesis, 2003, p.39.

Anne Galastro, ‘‘The arduous and responsible duty of arranging, classifying, and hanging…’: William Borthwick Johnstone and the nascent Scottish National Gallery’, Journal of Art Historiography, 1 June 2018, vol.18, at https://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/18-jun-18/ .

Acknowledgements: In Holland Esther van Duijn and Michiel Franklin provided information on Martin de Wild. At the National Galleries of Scotland Jacqueline Ridge gave access to the Woolford archive, Kerry Horsburgh and Amy Kerr to De Wild and other documents, and Helen Smailes to information on certain restorers as well as on Benjamin West’s The Death of the Stag. At the Royal Scottish Academy Robin H. Rodger provided detailed researched information on the crossover between the Academy and the National Gallery. To all the above this account is much indebted.

Added November 2022
National Portrait Gallery, London, established 1856, opened 1859.

This account explores the history of painting restoration and conservation at the National Portrait Gallery since its foundation in 1856 (sections 1 to 3). It also examines the treatment of miniatures, works on paper and sculpture (sections 4 and 5) and touches on recent years (section 6).

1. In search of a home, 1857-95
1.1 Great George St, Westminster, 1858-69
1.2 South Kensington, 1870-85
1.3 Bethnal Green, 1885-95

2. The next fifty years, 1895-1950
2.1 Sir Lionel Cust, 1895-1909
2.2 Sir Charles Holmes, 1909-16
2.3 James Milner, 1916-27
2.4 Sir Henry Hake, 1927-51

3. Continuing work, 1950-94
3.1 Charles Kingsley Adams, 1951-64
3.2 Sir Roy Strong, 1967-74
3.3 Dr John Hayes, 1974-94

4. Miniatures and works on paper

5. The care of sculpture

6. Recent years

Appendix: Scharf’s visits to restorers’ studios

The collection grew rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the acquisition of legal portraits from Serjeants’ Inn in 1877, historical portraits from the British Museum in 1879, loans from the National Gallery in 1883, legal portraits from Barnard’s Inn in 1884, G.F. Watts’s ‘Hall of Fame’ from the artist from 1895, and two large sets of Arctic explorers by Stephen Pearce in 1892 and 1899. In addition, the Gallery acquired three great group paintings, George Hayter’s Reformed House of Commons in 1858, Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Anti-Slavery Society Convention in 1880 and Karl Hickel’s House of Commons in 1885. These were prone to petty vandalism and their large size proved a challenge when it came to hanging, cleaning and lining.

Further large paintings were commissioned on the Gallery’s behalf before and after the First World War including John Lavery’s Royal Family at Buckingham Palace (1913), Arthur Cope’s Naval Officers of World War I (1921), John Singer Sargent’s General Officers of World War I (1922) and James Guthrie’s Statesmen of World War I (1924-30). The collection has widened in the last fifty years, with portrait photographs actively acquired from the late 1960s, and portraits of living individuals in all media collected from 1969 and commissioned from 1979.

Certain themes emerge:

  • the close engagement of George Scharf, first director, with a range of restorers
  • Scharf’s understanding of the importance of scientific advice in conserving works on paper
  • the Gallery’s close working relationship with the National Gallery in the 19th century
  • a reliance on expert staff at the South Kensington Museum (later the V&A) and the British Museum for care of works on paper and sculpture in the 19th century and subsequently
  • a reliance on leading freelance painting restorers, in line with other institutions: in the 19th century employing a wide variety of practitioners, in the 20th century four family firms successively until the 1970s, Haines, Dyer, Holder and Freeman
  • the protection of pictures by glazing in the late 19th century, which continues to this day, albeit now with low reflective glass
  • a growing awareness in the 1920s of the importance of controlling atmospheric conditions
  • an increase in funding and in the volume of conservation work from the late 1960s and the employment of vocationally trained freelance conservators
  • the survey and/or treatment of works on paper and miniatures from the 1970s
  • the opening of a paintings conservation studio on the premises in the 1970s, and of a purpose-built studio in 1993, leading to work being brought in house for freelancers to treat
  • greatly improved air-conditioned storage for works in all media in the late 1980s and early 1990s
  • a move away from freelancers to in-house salaried conservation staff in about 2005

In the following account, documents with the prefix ‘NPG’ form part of the Gallery's Records, as do ‘RP’ references (Register Packets, the files for individual portraits in the collection). These documents include Trustees’ minutes (NPG1, the minutes of trustees’ meetings since 1857), Trustees’ meeting correspondence (NPG2, the main correspondence sequence from 1857), Duplicates of Accounts (original and copy bills from individual restorers, 1857-1928), Duplicates of Estimates (1877-90) and Secretary’s journals (NPG7/1/1/1, Scharf’s official journal, 1861-95).

1. In search of a home, 1857-95

The collection opened to the public in January 1859. The Gallery’s Secretary, George Scharf (1820-95), was later designated as Director and knighted in 1895. In the space of 40 years, the Gallery saw four homes, a cramped 18th-century town house at 29 Great George St, Westminster (1858-69), the Royal Horticultural Society's old building on Exhibition Road, South Kensington (1870-85), the Bethnal Green Museum (1885-95) and finally the present purpose-built galleries in St Martin’s Place, designed by Ewan Christian, which opened in 1896.

South Kensington provided cleaner air than Westminster but the building was deemed unsuitable after a fire in an adjacent gallery. Bethnal Green (now the home of the Museum of Childhood) was claimed to be an unsafe environment for works of art: the iron roof with its skylights gave little protection against heat and cold, and it suffered from condensation. Only St Martin's Place was fit for purpose and Scharf never saw the collection hung there, dying at the age of seventy-four in 1895 as building work approached completion. His contribution is surveyed in an illustrated online article by the present author, ‘George Scharf and improving collection care and restoration at the National Portrait Gallery’, Journal of Art Historiography, no.18, 2018. Information on individual restorers mentioned in this history can be found in British picture restorers, 1600-1950 and on framemakers in British picture framemakers, 1600-1950.

The impetus for the restoration of paintings seems to have been threefold: the need to put new acquisitions in order, recommendations from collection surveys, and requirements arising in the course of moving the collection from one location to another.

1.1 Great George St, Westminster, 1858-69: The Gallery’s first home was a Georgian town house, which was soon crowded with portraits. For Scharf, an expert draughtsman and secretary to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857, assuming responsibility for a burgeoning collection meant learning about the processes of acquisition, display and framing, as well as the conservation needs of portraits in a wide range of media. He faced three collection challenges: housing the collection, protecting it from damage and deterioration and, where necessary, restoring individual works of art.

In Scharf’s early years as Gallery Secretary, the Trustees’ minutes were worded with fairly precise instructions, as for example with the portrait of James Cook acquired in 1858: ‘The Secretary was directed to have the picture of Captain Cook relined and the frame regilt. At the same time the writing on the back of the frame was to be carefully preserved.’ (NPG1/1, 27 January 1858). Later the roles were often reversed with Scharf informing the Trustees of his actions or making recommendations.

It was the restorer, George Barker (qv), to whom Scharf turned for work on the Cook portrait. He may have been recommended by Sir Charles Eastlake, a trustee at the Portrait Gallery and director at the National Gallery, who had described Barker as long ago as 1847 as ‘well known for his skill as a picture-restorer’. In any case, Scharf formed a sufficiently good working relationship with him to collect his photograph (NPG Ax5056) and, what is more, to have his own photograph taken by Barker (NPG Ax30343). Barker’s most expensive job for the Gallery was lining and restoring the Nathaniel Dance studio three-quarter-length, Robert, Lord Clive ‘of India’ for the considerable sum of £20 in 1858. Remarkably, in 1859 the Gallery suggested to Barker that his offer of the gift of a portrait, William Congreve, would be better managed as a purchase, on the basis that a gift would potentially bias the Gallery’s judgement in dealing with him in his capacity as a cleaner of pictures (RP 67). His last restoration work for the Gallery came when the collection was moved to South Kensington in 1869-70, at a time when he may in any case have been winding down his business.

Eastlake recommended Henry Merritt (qv) to Scharf in 1859: ‘I take this opportunity of enclosing the address of Mr. Merritt the restorer whom I mentioned to you. Should you ever require his services I can answer for his giving satisfaction.’ (NPG7/1/1/4/2/2, Letters from Trustees, 8 February 1859). Merritt was to prove of central importance to the National Portrait Gallery in its early years, acting as a restorer as well as providing advice. His work included parquetting [battening the back of a panel] and restoring John De Critz’s Earl of Salisbury for £8.10s in 1860, cleaning and restoring J.S. Copley’s full-length Lord Mansfield for £5 in 1864, ‘parquetting & part repairing portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh’ for £7.10s in 1865, lining, cleaning and ‘repairing nose of Old Pretender’ for £5 in 1872 (a portrait from the studio of Alexis Simon Belle), repairing the newly acquired Henry VII, formerly attributed to Sittow, in 1876, and putting in order portraits from Serjeants’ Inn for £11.14s.6d in 1877 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1, pp.76, 92). His death at the age of 55 in March 1877, Scharf felt, must be ‘a serious loss to the interests of art & the preservation of old paintings’ (Secretary’s journal, 12 July 1877).

Scharf came across the work of John Lewis Rutley (qv) as a restorer as early as 1862 (Secretary’s journal, 3 April 1862) but did not employ him until 1865 and then on the recommendation of the collector, John Henderson (NPG2, meeting of 26 April 1865). Rutley’s work for the Gallery included cleaning, lining and varnishing Allan Ramsay’s George III for £6 in 1866, and lining and restoring William Beechey’s Sir Francis Bourgeois in 1867 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1, pp.52, 74). When estimating for work on Henry Raeburn’s John Home in 1871, Rutley quoted £3 for lining, ‘slightly in excess of our usual charge for a ¾ portrait but the paint at the back of the canvas must be removed before relining’ (RP 320; see also Ingamells 2004 p.260).

Scharf liked to have two or three available painting restorers at any one time. As such, the Gallery employed William Anthony (1858-60), George Barker (1858-70), Henry Merritt (1859-77), Charles Augustus Mornewick (1860-61), John Lewis Rutley (1865-72), Manfred Holyoake (1868-77), John Reeve (1878-86), Frederick Haines & Sons (1878-1915), William Morrill (1887-94) and William Dyer (1889-95). To this list should be added the carver and gilder, Charles James (qv), who cleaned various pictures in 1857 before Scharf’s arrival, probably for William Carpenter, the acting secretary. Scharf rarely carried out restoration work himself but in 1864 he cleaned a corner of Thomas Beach’s William Woodfall to reveal the artist’s signature (NPG20/3, letter, Scharf to William Smith). In 1870 he carried out overnight retouching of a bare spot on an unnamed portrait, ‘where paint had fallen from canvas, before the public admitted’ (Secretary’s journal, 19 April 1870). He also treated Hilliard’s Queen Elizabeth miniature in 1863 (see section 4).

Scharf had a deep knowledge of country house collections. What set him apart from other curators of the time was his exceptionally close connections with both practicing picture restorers and with the owners of great country house collections. Time and again he recommended Gallery restorers to country house owners and sometimes he played an active role in the care of such collections. Blenheim is a notable example: Scharf visits the collection at the same time as George Barker in 1859, he supervises Henry Merritt’s work on Blenheim pictures in 1861, he entrusts two of the Duchess of Marlborough’s portraits to Manfred Holyoake (qv) in 1871, he takes in pictures from Blenheim for Samuel Paskell (qv) to work on in 1875 and he passes on to Frederick Andrew (qv) at the South Kensington Museum one of the Duchess’s miniature for repair in 1876. Scharf’s involvement extended to Claydon House in 1861, Lambeth Palace in 1864, Corsham Court in 1866 and Boughton House in 1887. He recommended Merritt to Sir Edward Cust in 1865 and Holyoake to Lady Camden at Bayham Abbey in 1873. He was asked by Lord Bath at Longleat to recommend a restorer and later he was requested to supply the name of the Gallery’s restorer to an artist trustee, John Everett Millais in 1895 who had a ‘little job’ he wanted doing.

Scharf’s relationship with restorers extended to privileged access to their studios, where he would note and sketch the works that he saw from various collections (see Appendix: Scharf’s visits to restorers’ studios). His interest even extended to collecting portrait photographs of some restorers, George Barker (see above), Frederick Haines Sr and Frederick Haines Jr.

Scharf was in an influential position. In 1865 he was approached by Henry Braun, agent to the Bavarian chemist, Dr Max Pettenkofer, presumably to promote the Pettenkofer process for treating the varnish of pictures by exposure to alcohol vapour, patented that year in England (Secretary’s journal, 25 January 1865). In 1871 the lithographer and painter, Paul Gauci, called on Scharf to demonstrate a ‘new kind’ of lac varnish, said to be ‘neither liable to bloom like mastic or to crack’ (Secretary’s journal, 9 October 1871; for Gauci’s letter, see NPG2, meeting of 23 November 1871). There is no evidence that either matter was taken further, unlike at the National Gallery where the Pettenkofer process was trialled in 1864 (see Avery-Quash 2015 p.852). Scharf received other external representations on the care of the collection. In 1867 he had to reassure the artist George Hayter, who feared the ‘total ruin’ of his ‘greatest labour’, his Reformed House of Commons, which the Gallery had owned since 1858 but which was housed at the Palace of Westminster (RP 54).

Much of the work on the National Portrait Gallery collection took the form of fairly basic maintenance such as surface cleaning and varnishing, although the term surface cleaning was not actually used and instead we find references to ‘polishing pictures’ in 1866 and to ‘removing house dirt’ in 1879 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1; Duplicates of Estimates, 15 April 1879) and only in 1895 to ‘cleaning the surfaces’ of pictures (Trustees’ minutes, 5 December 1895). Polishing pictures ranged from wiping and dusting with cotton, feather brushes or silk handkerchiefs, to partial washing of the surface of the picture, before polishing the surface to make it clear and glossy, according to Susanna Avery-Quash’s detailed account of work at the National Gallery (Avery-Quash 2015 p.851). Indeed, Scharf makes specific mention of obtaining ‘cotton wool to clean pictures’ in 1858, ‘soft brushes for cleaning the pictures’ in 1863 and ‘dusting brushes for pictures’ in 1876 (NPG7/3/1/15, 9 December 1858; Secretary’s journals, 19 May 1863, 3 July 1876). When Henry Merritt sent his assistant to polish pictures at the Gallery in 1866, he explained to Scharf, ‘I have restricted him to the use of wool with which, having had much practice, he can do no harm ... The defects of the portraits is the accumulation of ordinary London smoke deposit & it requires experience to remove this because water is, when carelessly applied, very faithful to mastic varnish, rendering the gum opaque. This is the reason why I should like to confine the present treatment to dry, soft, rubbing aided by breathing on the pictures.’ (NPG2, meeting of 12 April 1866).

As at the National Gallery, there were sometimes sensitivities about showing pictures fresh from full cleaning involving varnish removal. When Henry William Pickersgill’s recently acquired ‘Monk’ Lewis was cleaned in 1876, Scharf told his deputy chairman and friend, William Smith, ‘I will get young Holyoke to tone it down, & the picture will then look infinitely better. I should not like any one to see it in the present raw state.’ (NPG20/3, letter). More remarkably, when Richard Evans completed his own copy of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Self-portrait in 1868, it was sent off to Henry Merritt for toning and came back a fortnight later ‘well toned down’ (Secretary’s journal, 16, 31 July, 14 August 1868). Scharf’s later assistant, Laurence Holland, defined toning as ‘a final peculiar varnish to give age, & take off crudeness of painting’ (NPG100/4).

Preventative conservation was an early concern, primarily met by glazing pictures for protection. In 1866 Scharf recommended to the Trustees that some of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s pictures should be protected ‘with Plate-glass in a similar manner to that adopted at the National Gallery’ (Trustees’ minutes, 12 April 1866). Such glazing was seen as the best form of protection against what Scharf later described as ‘the constant action of dust and … the effects of [visitors’] steamy warm breath at holiday seasons’ (12 June 1872). If there was a single concern evident in the Gallery’s early annual reports, it was the protection of the collection by glazing, first mentioned in 1866 and reportedly complete by 1899 except for the largest pictures. The collection continues to be so protected to this day but now with low reflective glass. Glazing had another advantage: it greatly reduced the likelihood of petty vandalism. There had been reports every few years of paintings being superficially scratched or pierced by visitors, especially while the collection was housed at South Kensington.

1.2 South Kensington, 1870-85: Having outgrown its premises in Westminster, the Gallery moved in 1870 to more spacious quarters in a former Royal Horticultural Society building in Exhibition Road in South Kensington. For building services, Scharf was dependent on the Office of Works and the Science and Art Department. Repeated problems in the heating system left the galleries as cold as 36°F (2.5°C) on occasion (Secretary’s journal, 25 February 1873).

George Barker and John Lewis Rutley were employed less often following the move to South Kensington. Scharf took on Manfred Holyoake, presumably recommended by Henry Merritt, his former master. In the ten years from 1868, Holyoake was a regular visitor to the Gallery, polishing and varnishing pictures and carrying out straightforward remedial work. There was a so-called ‘restoring room’ on the premises at South Kensington. Holyoake published his 80-page manual, The Conservation of Pictures, in 1870 and started calling himself a conserver of pictures, an early example of the use of this term. He began undertaking more demanding work for the Gallery in 1870, when he cleaned recently acquired panels of Elizabeth of York and Henry IV (Secretary’s journal, 1 August 1870). Holyoake used Samuel Paskell for lining work in 1873 and 1874 (Secretary’s journal, 7 April, 20 August 1873). But things began to go wrong. Holyoake’s wife fell ill and died in 1874. Scharf extended his friendship to Holyoake, a friendship which became particularly close in 1875 when ‘Manfred’ is often noted in Scharf’s personal diary as staying with him. Subsequently, it emerged that Holyoake had been seeking loans from more than one of the Gallery’s attendants, leading to his dismissal in March 1877. Scharf told him how dissatisfied he was, having recommended him as a restorer, not least at Cobham Hall and Bayham Abbey (NPG7/1/1/3/5).

After Holyoake’s dismissal and Merritt’s death, both in 1877, Scharf needed to make new arrangements for cleaning pictures. He consulted the National Gallery concerning their process for polishing pictures, finding that they employed ‘Buttery’, that is Charles Buttery (qv) or his son, Horace (Secretary’s journal, 10 March 1877). He enquired about Merritt’s assistants and received a visit from Giovanni Sciarretta (qv) on Mrs Merritt’s recommendation (Secretary’s journal, 21 July, 14 August 1877). In the event, he brought in Merritt’s other assistant, John Reeve (qv), for routine work and Frederick Haines (qv), already employed by the Royal collection, for more demanding tasks. He was approached by Horace Buttery for work in 1878 (NPG2, meeting of 14 November 1878). Scharf would sometimes employ a member of the Gallery’s attendant staff to polish pictures, as in 1883 when John Searle undertook such work (Secretary’s journal, 23 November 1883).

Reeve worked for the National Portrait Gallery, 1877-86. He put himself forward on the basis that he had previously worked at the Gallery polishing pictures under Merritt’s direction, and offered his services at the same rate as Merritt (Trustees’ minutes, 25 July 1877). Initially Reeve was used for quite straightforward tasks, but soon he was employed on more problematic pictures, as with the panel, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (‘much injured by time’), which he restored for £10 in 1879 (Trustees’ minutes, 28 February 1879). His work included treating Gerlach Flicke’s Thomas Cranmer, a panel transferred from the British Museum, lining Benjamin Robert Haydon’s large Anti-Slavery Society Convention on a folding stretcher for £20 in 1880, transferring from panel, lining and putting in order Mary, Queen of Scots after Nicholas Hilliard for £4.10s in 1881, and transferring from cartoon paper to canvas John Partridge’s sketch, The Fine Arts Commissioners, for £10.10s in 1881 (he had to detach some paint from the glass of the frame as a result of dampness) (Secretary’s journal, 16 April 1879, 27 October 1881; Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1, p.111, vol.2, pp.11, 12). In a letter dated 28 March 1878, Reeve explained, 'I must decline to do work at the Gallery such as Lining & Joiners Panel Work as my Business at home would be at a standstill by the removal of my plant' (Duplicates of Estimates, p.18). Often Reeve would line a picture which Haines would then restore.

Frederick Haines & Sons were first employed early in 1878 and continued to work for the Gallery for many years. With their premises in Fulham Road, they were conveniently situated for the Portrait Gallery in South Kensington. Over the five years from 1878, this business tackled several collections of pictures transferred to the Gallery: from the British Museum in 1879 (with Reeve, see Trustees’ minutes, vol.3, pp.162, 181), the National Gallery in 1883 and Barnard’s Inn in 1884 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.2, p.56; Duplicates of Estimates, p.33). Work on the National Gallery pictures cost almost £75 in November 1883 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.2, p.48; Duplicates of Estimates, p.24), including significant charges for two Thomas Lawrence full-lengths, John Philip Kemble at £31.15s (with lining), and Sarah Siddons at £10.10s (both now Tate, as are five other pictures he treated). The National Gallery’s director, Frederic Burton, was said by Scharf to be much pleased with Haines’s cleaning work (Secretary’s journal, 22 September 1883). An article in The Times on a display of the cleaned pictures at the Portrait Gallery can be traced back to Scharf, judging by Haines’s thanks to him for their mention (The Times 24 November 1883; NPG2, meeting of 26 November 1883). The article attributed the deterioration in certain pictures to ‘exposure to gas and heated air in the South Kensington Museum’, falling in with the National Gallery’s critical rhetoric concerning conditions at South Kensington.

Scharf had reservations as to Haines junr’s retouching skills in 1881 when it came to the considerable task of painting in the draperies in a badly damaged and problematic recently acquired portrait, then described as representing William Faithorne (inv.618, see Secretary’s journal, 9 March 1881).

One of the more unusual responsibilities for restorers was reducing large portraits in size. This was intended to make them easier to fit into the crowded displays or ostensibly to improve their appearance. This occasional practice was initiated in 1867 when Sir Francis Grant, recently appointed a trustee as President of the Royal Academy, suggested that John Graham Gilbert’s unfinished replica portrait, Sir Walter Scott, ‘could be greatly improved by curtailment’ (Trustees’ minutes, 21 June 1867). In 1875 portraits purchased at the artist, Henry William Pickersgill’s sale, were reduced in size, apparently including George Stephenson and William Godwin (Secretary’s journal, 23 July 1875). In 1876, in the case of Samuel Laurence’s Charles Babbage, folded back by Henry Merritt to hide ‘the dark unmeaning background’, this led to protests from the sitter’s son, Col. Babbage, who had to be reassured by Scharf that the portrait had not actually been cut (it was unfolded by Reeve at some cost in 1882) (Trustees’ minutes, 18 May 1878; Duplicates of Accounts, vol.2, p.31). This practice of reducing pictures in size continued for many years, but now always after discussion with the trustees. In 1879, following slight damage, Thomas Lawrence’s unfinished William Wilberforce was reduced from a vertical format of about 56 x 44 ins to a horizontal canvas of 38 x 43 ins. A photograph had been taken and marked up to show the ‘precise limits for the reduction’ (Trustees’ minutes, 10 May 1879). For a fuller illustrated account of the practice of altering portraits in size, see ‘Reducing Portraits in Size’, forthcoming on this website.

1.3 Bethnal Green, 1885-95: After a fire in an adjoining building at South Kensington in 1885, the collection was moved hurriedly to Bethnal Green. The museum there was the responsibility of the Science and Art Department, meaning that the Portrait Gallery was accommodated as a guest. The Gallery stipulated from the outset that beyond necessary dusting of the pictures, no polishing, varnishing, repairing or restoration should be carried out without the knowledge of the Gallery’s trustees and director and then only by its own restorers (Trustees’ minutes, 18 July 1885). It was also agreed that the pictures and busts would be arranged by Science and Art Department officers.

Moving the collection to Bethnal Green was demanding. In the case of Hayter's large Reformed House of Commons, the picture had to be folded over and transported in a specially prepared cradle, recorded by Scharf in a detailed drawing (NPG66/2/2/9).

The Gallery was allocated offices for its staff and library at 20 Great George St, close to its original home in Westminster but some five miles from Bethnal Green. In his declining years Scharf rarely inspected the collection, but relied on his clerk, Laurence Holland, to do so, and on his man on the spot, the Gallery’s messenger, Charles William Edward, who made weekly reports (NPG66/3/2). Edward’s rather basic reports, from 1885 to 1895, make references to the condition of paintings and to on-site restoration work by Haines and other restorers. His very first, in October 1885, highlighted the condition of Hayter’s Reformed House of Commons: ‘White patch on right hand side similar as from result of damp, also several small patches paint rubbed off’. Edwards also occasionally mentioned environmental matters, as in May 1886 (‘In consequence of the wet weather a great number of the Portraits have been in a very baggy condition’). Haines & Sons visited Bethnal Green on demand and to undertake more wide ranging surveys. They drew attention to the fact that there was no room there for lining pictures which meant that they would need to be taken to their own premises in South Kensington (Trustees’ minutes, 10 June 1886).

There were a series of problems associated with the condition and housing of the collection. In January 1886 melting snow from the roof leaked on to the backs of some pictures, three of which then needed work by John Reeve (NPG66/3/1, on the collection at Bethnal Green). In April the Science and Art Department drew attention to the need for some surface cleaning of pictures, which Haines & Sons addressed. In June Scharf was notified informally by George Wallis of the South Kensington Museum that the marble busts needed attention, work which was carried out by Frederick Andrew (see section 5).

Work was also required on a few pictures in the collection that had been placed on display at the National Gallery, including Karl Hickel’s recently acquired large House of Commons. Charles Eastlake junr, the National Gallery’s keeper, wrote to Scharf that the picture was showing superficial cracking with ‘a tendency to crack more or less over the whole canvas’ (Trustees’ minutes, 19 March 1887). Haines recommended lining but the only liner permitted to work on National Gallery premises was William Morrill (qv). It took a letter from Frederic Burton as the National’s director, providing comparative details of the costs of lining large pictures at the National Gallery, to persuade the Portrait Gallery trustees to authorise Morrill’s £40 estimate for double lining, more than the Gallery had ever expended on a single work. Haines then charged a further £20 for his own work in cleaning, repairing, retouching and varnishing (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.2, p.129). Morrill came with a strong recommendations from Burton, ‘I have never observed in Morrill any desire to make jobs for himself. And I think that both his honesty & his experience may be relied upon in any recommendation he makes as to the soundest course to pursue in any given case.’ (Trustees’ minutes, 19 March 1887). Over the next forty years, the Portrait Gallery used the Morrill family for lining work from time to time.

It was not until 1887 that the Gallery began to use its annual report to list recently restored pictures, including Hickel’s House of Commons. In the winter of 1888-89 melting snow dripped on to five portraits at Bethnal Green. The Trustees then held a special meeting to consider a report on the condition of the collection (Trustees’ minutes, 30 April 1889; report, see NPG66/3/1/3). Many of the pictures were found by Frederick Haines and another restorer, William Dyer (qv), to be in deplorable condition. 'Dreadful state. The canvas is in a terrible state' (Godfrey Kneller's James II) and 'Paint lifting and blistering all over' (Cardinal Wolsey) were two of the comments. Six pictures were directed to be committed to Haines to be put in order and not returned to Bethnal Green. While the conditions at the museum were thought to be unacceptable (and questions were asked in Parliament), no blame was put on the museum authorities. Although work was about to start on the Gallery’s new permanent building in St Martin’s Place, collection storage was now under such pressure that a further ten pictures were deposited at the National Gallery.

Perhaps because of the volume of restoration work, William Dyer was employed from 1889 in addition to Haines. Scharf had known Dyer since at least 1871 (Secretary’s journal, 5 September 1871) and would have been aware that he had been working for the National Gallery more recently. Dyer cleaned and repaired John Partridge’s Earl of Aberdeen for £10.10s in 1894, a picture that William Morrill had transferred from its original canvas and triple lined for £8.10s (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.3, pp.66, 75). ‘The picture is in such a bad state’, Morrill wrote, ‘that it will be impossible for me to do anything with it unless it is transferred to another canvas, as the paint is loose mostly all over from the original canvas’ (RP 750).

Towards the very end of his life, we can illustrate Scharf’s way of working through his approach to a newly acquired early panel painting, William Paget, 1st Baron Paget, in 1894. On 8 February Scharf made a meticulous drawing in his sketchbook, which he annotated with colour notes and research information. On 19 March he received Trustees’ approval to acquire the portrait and to put it into ‘perfect order’. On 22 June he obtained his chairman’s approval to consult William Dyer on cleaning and repairing the picture. On 9 July he obtained an estimate from Dyer, ‘I beg to say that the cost to do what is necessary to the little portrait of Wm Lord Pagett will be 5 or 6 pounds’, an estimate which was initialled by the chairman to indicate his approval. On 26 July Dyer’s bill was passed for payment. On 6 December the return of the picture, ‘well cleaned and restored’, was reported to the trustees.

Scharf died in April 1895, shortly before the new building was occupied. For his approach to the treatment of works on paper and sculpture, see sections 4 and 5.

2. The next fifty years, 1895-1950

Over the next fifty years, the Gallery continued to work closely with other institutions, both providing and seeking advice. Environmental conditions received greater attention, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, and the conservation of pictures began to be put on a more scientific basis. This period saw four directors, Lionel Cust (1895-1909), Charles Holmes (1909-16), James Milner (1916-27) and Henry Hake (1927-51). Whereas in Scharf’s day, the Gallery usually had two picture restorers on its books, it now tended to rely on just one family business, namely the Haines brothers until 1919 and then William Holder & Sons, with William Morrill & Son undertaking lining work.

2.1 Sir Lionel Cust, 1895-1909: With the appointment of Lionel Cust (1859-1929) from the Prints and Drawings department at the British Museum as Director in 1895, the overall condition of the collection became the subject of comment in the Gallery’s report (38th Annual Report, 1895). In preparation for the opening of the new galleries in St Martin’s Place in April 1896, ‘a thorough inspection of the pictures was made by Messrs. Haines, picture restorers to the Gallery, and it was decided that the whole collection ... stood in need of a thorough surface-cleaning before they were rehung’ (Trustees’ minutes, 27 June, see also 5 December 1895). Haines identified 87 portraits in need of relining or, in the case of a dozen or more, needing to be ‘entirely put into the restorer’s hands’. This applied especially to portraits transferred from the British Museum in 1879, many of which were in very poor condition ‘through long continued neglect and exposure to dirt’. Much work was then carried out.

The new building was not without its problems. During summer 1901, even with the internal blinds closed, the temperature would reach as high as 80°F (27°C), a level which was described as perilous to the portraits and particularly those on panel. External blinds were seen as one potential solution and electric ventilation fans another (fans were installed in the Gallery’s East Wing in 1906) (NPG, ‘Works, HMOW 1895-1902’; Trustees’ minutes, 24 May 1906). Such problems, although abated, continued until the 1980s when a new system of air conditioning and external shutters was fitted (as the present author witnessed).

From the mid-1890s, many portraits were subject to treatment, often no more than surface cleaning and varnishing, as now regularly listed in annual reports. A few paintings were subject to more elaborate treatment: two panels were ‘parquetted, cleaned and varnished’ in 1901, Gheeraerts’s William Camden, and the anonymous Unknown man called John Speed, both once in the British Museum. For paintings, the Gallery continued to employ Frederick Haines & Sons. Occasionally, for particular reasons, another restorer would be commissioned as in 1907 when White, Allom & Co, specialists in large-scale works, stripped, cleaned, restored and laid on a laminated panel Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Anti-Slavery Society Convention for £31.10s (Duplicates of Accounts, 1 November 1907; Trustees’ minutes, 30 January 1908). When the self-publicising William Mailes Power (qv) offered to restore at his own expense John Partridge’s large and bituminous painting, The Meeting of the Fine Arts Commission, 1846, the picture was thought too far decayed to be worth restoring, an assessment first made as early as 1884 and which stands to this day (Trustees’ minutes, 21 May 1908).

Lionel Cust’s opinion was sought by the Ashmolean Museum (qv) in 1896 concerning the Tradescant pictures. He thought Horace Buttery’s estimate to the Ashmolean very high but agreed that the collection was in urgent need of attention. Then in 1903 the Fitzwilliam Museum (qv) came to him for advice on the condition of its pictures, eliciting a predictably recommendation to go to Haines & Sons for a report and estimate. As Surveyor of the King's Pictures from 1901, Cust employed Haines to remove layers of dirt from pictures at Buckingham Palace and to treat other pictures (Lionel Cust, King Edward VII and His Court, 1930, pp.29-30). Cust's advice on picture restoration was also sought by the Office of Works (NPG, ‘Works, HMOW 1903-10’). He continued as Director at the Portrait Gallery until 1909.

2.2 Sir Charles Holmes, 1909-16: With the appointment of the landscape painter and Burlington Magazine editor, Charles Holmes (1868-1936), as Director in 1909, restoration work soon ceased to be the subject of remark in the Gallery’s annual reports, a situation that continued during the directorships of James Milner and Henry Hake until 1956, and then again until 1975. Furthermore, there is rather less reference to restoration in the trustees’ minutes for the period. This is despite Holmes’ personal interest in restoration and painting materials which led to the publication of his short book, Notes on the Science of Picture-Making in 1909. An enquiry from the Auditor General in 1914 on how exhibits at the gallery were checked led Holmes to respond, inter alia, that it was the duty of attendants to report ‘at once any change in them such as fading, cracking, or “blooming” of varnish, which they may observe’ (Trustees’ minutes, 22 October 1914).

Nevertheless some significant restoration work took place. F. Haines & Sons used William Morrill & Son to undertake ‘special lining’ of Patrick Branwell Brontë’s Emily Brontë and The Brontë Sisters for £10 on acquisition in 1914, uniquely allowing damage to remain visible (the portraits had been discovered forgotten in a wardrobe); see The Brontë Sisters. When John Everett Millais's Thomas Carlyle was attacked by a suffragette later the same year, Haines charged £25 for work on the picture, which entailed ’lining & drawing threads together & lining again on a second cloth’ (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.7, pp.123, 131).

Quite why the dealers and restorers, Shepherd Bros (qv), were chosen to treat three portraits, General Lambert, the so-called Duke of Monmouth and Sir Isaac Newton, in 1910 remains to be seen (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.7, pp.12, 23); they were then recommended as restorers by Holmes’s assistant, James Milner, in 1913 when his advice was sought by the Munich art expert Edwin Oppé (NPG66/4/2/3, Milner’s diary, 31 March 1913; NPG104/4/10).

The practice of cutting down paintings continued but was debated. While Johan van Diest’s Field Marshal George Wade was reduced in size and made into an oval in 1911, the treatment of another newly acquired picture, John Closterman’s James Craggs the Elder, divided opinion in 1914 and the trustees decided not to cut it down (Trustees’ minutes, 30 March 1911, 2 April 1914). Richard Wilson’s large group portrait, Dr Ayscough and the Two Princes, was divided in two in 1915, on the basis that this would restore it to its two ‘original’ component parts, but this was not really so and the process would be reversed in 1976 (24 June, 14 October 1915). For images, see ‘Reducing Portraits in Size’, forthcoming on this website.

Holmes remained as director until he moved to the National Gallery in 1916. For his chairman at the Portrait Gallery, Lord Dillon, he personally restored a copy of Holbein’s Archbishop William Warham, a panel which Dillon later gave to the Gallery (Charles Holmes, Self & Partners, 1936, p.295). In an old but now dying tradition of artist-curators undertaking restoration work, Holmes laid the blisters, filling and retouching them, work which, he says, the restorer, Ayerst Hooker Buttery (qv), had refused because of the high charge he would have needed to make. After his move to the National Gallery, Holmes was closely involved in actually restoring pictures but there is no evidence that he undertook work of this kind on the Portrait Gallery’s collection.

2.3 James Milner, 1916-27: James Donald Milner (1874-1927) was the last survivor from the Scharf era. He had begun as a clerk, age 19, under Scharf in 1893, was promoted director in 1916 and died in office at the age of 52 in 1927. That he held responsibility for managing the programme of picture restoration is confirmed by the statement in 1922 of the Gallery’s then chairman, Lord Crawford, to his fellow trustees that he was of the opinion that ‘the cleaning and restoration of pictures in the national collection was a matter which could be safely left to the judgement of the officers in charge of the respective departments’ (Trustees’ minutes, 26 October 1922). This was in response to an approach from the Society of Mural Decorators and Painters in Tempera submitting that no picture should be cleaned or restored unless ‘the necessity of such operation has been admitted by a selected body of competent judges’. Crawford added that the Society’s approach had already been considered by the trustees and director of the National Gallery. It should be noted that at the National Gallery, where Crawford was a trustee, the authority of the director in matters of picture restoration came to be challenged by Crawford among others (see Jacob Simon, ‘Charles Holmes and the restoration of paintings at the National Gallery’, Burlington Magazine, vol.161, 2019, pp.737-43).

During the First World War some of the collection was stored in London underground stations but by January 1918 more serious bombing raids meant that the best pictures were moved to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth (see Evacuating portraits in the First World War).

The Gallery’s restorers, F. Haines & Sons, now run by the two elderly sons, ceased to trade as a partnership in 1916. Frederick Haines junr died the following year, leaving the sixty-year-old Herbert Haines to carry on alone until 1919. To meet the considerable demands for work on the collection arising from wartime storage, James Milner turned to William Holder & Sons (qv) in late 1919, a business that had been taken up by the National Gallery in 1917 and which remained the Portrait Gallery’s restorers for many years. It was not until April 1920 that the Gallery reopened to the public and, in preparation, the liners William Morrill & Son re-stretched the large group portraits, which had been rolled during the war (NPG66/4/2/4, Milner’s diary, 12 February 1920).

Holder’s bills provide an insight into the variety of cleaning work at the Gallery, with references to surface cleaning, partial cleaning and cleaning. A good deal of cleaning work was carried out in the 1920s, often in tandem with structural work by Morrill. Thus in 1922 Morrill replaced the battens with keys on the Phoenix Queen Elizabeth I panel for £2, a panel that was then repaired by Holder for £4.4s (Duplicates of Accounts, 27 March, 29 March 1922). The same year Holder ‘ironed down bituminous cracks’, cleaned and repaired William Davison’s newly acquired Robert Lindley for £6.6s (Duplicates of Accounts, 23 October 1922). Only occasionally was cleaning brought to the attention of the trustees as with another new acquisition, J.J. Masquerier’s Admiral Schanck, cleaned by Holder for £9.9s in 1922, which was specially displayed for the trustees, leading them to express ‘their entire satisfaction with the results of Mr. Holder’s work’; the cost would suggest full cleaning (Trustees’ minutes, 2 February 1922).

The 1920s saw a growing awareness that it was changing levels of humidity, rather than temperature as such, that was critical to the health of the collection. In 1925 the newly acquired Darnley Queen Elizabeth I panel cracked soon after it was put on display, owing to low humidity. It was reported that this had come about owing to the temperature having risen during the Easter holidays to over 65°F (18°C), which was 5°F above the (seemingly low, to modern eyes) maximum laid down for the guidance of the engineer in charge of the heating apparatus; furthermore the electric fans were not working. The report concluded that ‘experiments should be tried to maintain a certain humidity in these rooms’, so as to reduce the dryness caused by the heating system (Trustees’ minutes, 30 April 1925). With the encouragement of one of the trustees, the biologist Sir William Bate Hardy, water pans were installed in rooms with early panel paintings (though their effectiveness was doubted by the Office of Works, based on experience at the National Gallery). The relative humidity in these galleries was now recorded, possibly for the first time (NPG, ‘Works, HMOW 1925-33’, letters, 22 June, 11 August 1925, and early RH charts; Trustees’ minutes, 25 June 1925).

Five portraits were reduced in size during Milner’s ten-year directorship, usually on acquisition and always after reference to the trustees. In 1919 Paul Ludovici’s large half-length Sir William Crookes was reduced to a bust size, as was Hubert von Herkomer’s John Couch Adams. In 1923 William Boxall’s David Cox was reduced to a head-and-shoulders and Thomas Phillips’s Thomas Arnold to ‘an ordinary half length’. In 1926 the practice was queried by one of the trustees, Lord Bathurst, whose objections led the Trustees to agree on ‘the undesirability of cutting down canvases except where imperatively necessary’. See Trustees’ minutes, 26 June, 23 October 1919, 28 June, 25 October 1923, 9 December 1926. For images, see ‘Reducing Portraits in Size’, forthcoming on this website.

2.4 Sir Henry Hake, 1927-51: Like Lionel Cust a generation before, Henry Hake (1892-1951) came to the directorship from the Prints and Drawings department at the British Museum. His approach to picture restoration was cautious, focussing on understanding and experimentation and in particular on controlling environmental conditions, reflecting wider concerns in the museum community at the time. Two subsequent directors, David Piper and Roy Strong, have left accounts of his work. Strong knew Hake only by repute but ascribed to him certain immovable principles, one of which was that no picture should ever be cleaned. Piper worked for Hake for four years and later recorded that generally not more than half a dozen or so paintings were treated a year owing to shortage of funds and that these were sent to Holder’s studio, then opposite Claridge’s, where the ‘elderly, gentle magician’, Mr Vallance, was engaged in cleaning (NPG13/1/1, p.27). According to Piper, Hake thought the National Gallery’s policy in cleaning and restoration seriously suspect, despite occasionally enjoying the advice of its excellent scientific staff. For Piper, see his unpublished autobiography, chapter 8, written 1985-6 (NPG13/1/1); for Strong, his article ‘The National Portrait Gallery: the missing years’, British Art Journal, vol.4, no.2, 2003, p.77.

In September 1929 a conference was held to discuss the influence of atmospheric humidity on works of art, involving senior staff from the National Gallery, Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Office of Works, various research departments and the Meteorological Office (NPG, ‘HMOW, Effects of humidity on pictures, 1929-33’). On behalf of the Portrait Gallery, Hake reported on recent problems with panel pictures blistering (and two ivory miniatures cracking). There were somewhat similar difficulties with panels at the National Gallery. Hake observed that ‘pictures in country houses where central heating was absent kept better than in the heated galleries’. Subsequent evidence as to problems in controlling gallery conditions is available: over two months, April-May 1931, relative humidity ranged from 27% to 87%. These readings were cited in correspondence in 1937 concerning a possible air conditioning system in the three central galleries on the top floor of the original building, a system designed to bring humidity up from the lowest levels but not down from the highest (NPG, ‘HMOW General 1934-1938’, letter, 11 January 1937).

A second inter-museum meeting was held in April 1930. It appears to have led to a technical report by S.T.C. Stillwell and R.A.G. Knight, Investigation into the Blistering and Flaking of Old Panel Paintings on Wood, published by the Forest Products Research Laboratory in August 1931; the report was reissued by the Courtauld Institute as one of the appendices to Some Notes on Atmospheric Humidity in Relation to Works of Art in 1935.

A larger scale museum conference was held at the Board of Scientific and Industrial Research in October 1931 to consider two main problems facing curators of picture galleries, firstly the ‘conditions under which the pictures are housed, i.e., the condition of the air and the strength of the light in the galleries’ and, secondly, ‘The preservation and care in health and sickness of the pictures themselves’ (NPG11/1/57). It was recorded that five separate subjects of scientific investigation were in progress:

  • ‘The influence of changes in temperature and humidity on the cracking and blistering of panels’ (Forest Products Research Laboratory; see above)
  • ‘The detailed observation at stated intervals of 20 selected panels in the National Gallery to ascertain the effect of seasonal changes of temperature and of humidity and of the differences of panel structures, etc, on their liability to flake, blister and split’ (Dr Plenderleith, British Museum Laboratory)
  • ‘The observation and recording over a period of months of the relative variations of temperature and humidity in selected rooms in the National Gallery, the National Gallery of Scotland and the National Portrait Gallery’ (H.M. Office of Works)
  • ‘The types of varnish in general use with a view to discovering those most suitable, and similarly, of the substances in use for relining’ (Dr Alexander Scott, British Museum Laboratory)
  • ‘The value of vinyl acetate as a varnish’ (Prof. Morgan, Chemical Research Laboratory)

One outcome from this conference was an Office of Works report in 1932, Protection of Pictures and Museum Specimens, focusing as much on protection through framing as on the control of humidity (NPG, ‘HMOW, Effects of Humidity on Pictures’).

There was a further conference at the Courtauld Institute in March 1934, when Hake took detailed notes of proposals for a research laboratory to serve the needs of leading galleries of pictures. Prof. William Constable from the Courtauld identified four main heads for such a laboratory, the study of the physical condition of pictures, conditions of preservation, the treatment of disease and the relative safety of current methods both of preservation and treatment (NPG11/1/57, ‘Notes of Conference at Courtauld Institute’, 16 March 1934). Research laboratories were established at both the National Gallery and the Courtauld in 1934.

Perhaps encouraged by the investigatory climate of the time, Hake suggested a remarkable scheme to C.H. Collins Baker, keeper at the National Gallery, in February 1931, although there is no evidence that it was followed through. He had the agreement of the Portrait Gallery’s restorer, Holder, to an experiment which would have meant finding a canvas of no importance needing repair, dividing it into three pieces, lining one with glue, another with bees wax and a third with paraffin wax, with perhaps a fourth given to Kennedy North (qv) to treat, with the results being hung up in a quiet corner to see how they behaved over a period of 20 or 30 years (NPG, Restorers files, letter, 26 February 1931). Five years later, Hake’s proposal for the Portrait Gallery to purchase a 16th-century English panel for experimental purposes got at least as far as the acquisition of a suitable portrait, although no results are recorded; the idea, as discussed with Dr Alexander Scott at the British Museum, was ‘to advance the study of stratification, that is the history and behaviour of successive layers of paint’ (Trustees’ minutes, 22 October, 3 December 1936, 11 February 1937). Hake’s passion for experimentation continued unabated to the extent that in winter/spring 1938-39 packing materials were tested; for example, using old students’ copies, ‘a parcel of canvases wrapped in waterproof paper was left out in the snow for a fortnight’ (Trustees’ minutes, 10 February 1944).

For five years from 1929, one of the Gallery long-serving attendants, later head attendant, William Charles Redman (1890-1971), provided straightforward observational reports on the condition of pictures on display, for example in 1931 when he reported on the panel after Holbein, Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘Warped on both sides & old crack down centre is opening at bottom’, but there is no record of treatment (NPG, Restorers files). This was a continuation of a system of using attendant staff to report on the collection, used in the 1880s and 1890s at Bethnal Green Museum (see section 1) and the subject of report to the Auditor-General in 1914 (section 2.2).

As to actual picture restoration at the Portrait Gallery, documentation for this period is less accessible since not fully catalogued (the Gallery letter sequence) or not filed as a central sequence (portrait restoration accounts). There is little sense of a campaign to put works in order for the opening of the Duveen extension in March 1933 as there had been when the original building opened in 1896, excepting a short report by Holder in January 1933.

The work that was done focussed mainly on recent acquisitions. William Dyer & Sons were employed to surface clean and varnish Arthur Cope’s recently completed large Naval Officers of the First World War for £16.16s in 1928 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.6, p.54). In 1931, apparently for the first time, a prospective acquisition was subject to scientific investigation. The panel portrait, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury was examined using a low-power microscope and x-ray photography was proposed (Trustees’ minutes, 9 April 1931). The use of x-rays led to the reassessment of several portraits, including in 1939 a panel known as Lady Margaret Beaufort, see Acquisition histories: unknown woman, formerly Margaret Beaufort.

While much of Holder’s work involved surface cleaning and revarnishing or securing blisters, some pictures were subject to at least partial varnish removal. To take some examples, in 1931 Holder charged £6.6s for removing discoloured varnish and repaints, repairing and revarnishing William Palmer’s small Amos Cottle, and £10.10s for 'slight cleaning, repairing, reviving, cutting down and revarnishing' Joseph Wright of Derby's Thomas Day (though the cutting down must have been minimal). In 1933 Dirk Stoop’s Catherine of Braganza was subject to removal of discoloured varnish for £9.9s as was Carl Fredrik von Breda’s Rev. James Ramsay for £10.10s. In 1936 Holder charged £11.11s for ‘removing dirt and varnish, ironing down bituminous paint, repairing and revarnishing’ Lemuel Abbott’s William Cowper.

In 1935, through Hake’ assistant, Charles Kingsley Adams, the Gallery began to provide advice on the conservation of portraits at 10 Downing Street and in other government buildings controlled by the Office of Works (NPG, ‘HMOW General 1934-1938’, letters, 4 February, 30 November 1935).

During the Second World War the Gallery was initially closed and many pictures were stored at Mentmore, a country house in Buckinghamshire, in a carefully planned process benefitting from experience in the First War (see Evacuating portraits in the Second World War). Environmental conditions were monitored and proved better than those in the galleries in London (Trustees’ minutes, 7 December 1939). Pictures were removed from their frames and stacked one against another, separated by sliced corks which were nailed into the corners of the painted surface (as the present author was informed on joining the Gallery’s staff in 1983). Later some of the pictures were moved to Westwood in Wiltshire (Trustees’ minutes, 25 June, 22 October 1942).

The Gallery largely reopened in July 1945. David Piper has described how in the bitterly cold winter of January-February 1947 Hake’s pragmatic approach to conservation of panel paintings triumphed: the Tudor gallery with its many panel paintings was closed to the public, wires stretched across the gallery, and long strips made from army blankets hung across them with their ends terminating in buckets of water on the floor, so maintaining the humidity (NPG13/1/1, pp.27-8). No panel in the Gallery cracked, he said, in contrast to the National Gallery next door. However, Piper’s account, written many years after the event, is not borne out by reports to the trustees in January and April 1947 of cracked panels. It was decided that repairs to these panels should be carried out by Frank Walter Creffield (qv), described as the Gallery’s ‘house carpenter’, under the supervision of William Vallance of Holder’s, the Gallery’s restorer, and with advice from Henry Lamb, an artist trustee (Trustees’ minutes, 30 January, 24 April 1947). These panels included the Darnley Queen Elizabeth I, which Creffield treated in 1948, the Mierevelt studio panel, Viscount Dorchester, treated in 1949, and several others in the years to 1953, as is discussed in more detail in the entry for Creffield in this online resource.

3. Continuing work, 1950-94

Care of the collection became increasingly important in the years after 1950, not least in the way that the Gallery communicated its work. The period saw four directors: Charles Kingsley Adams (1951-64), David Piper (1964-67), Roy Strong (1967-74) and John Hayes (1974-94). Under Strong, the conservation budget grew and the foundations of the Gallery’s current approach were laid. Under Hayes, the storage of works of art was greatly improved and a purpose-built conservation studio was opened.

3.1 Charles Kingsley Adams, 1951-64: Charles Kingsley Adams (1899-1971) joined the Gallery at the age of 19 as acting assistant keeper in 1919. He worked for Hake for many years and succeeded him as Director in 1951, inheriting his deep distrust of restorers, a distrust reinforced by the post-war National Gallery cleaning controversy, according to Roy Strong (‘The National Portrait Gallery: the missing years’, British Art Journal, vol.4, no.2, 2003, p.77).

In 1956, for the first time in many years, collection care, now described as ‘conservation’, was the subject of public report, focusing on preventative conservation needs (a plenum heating system with air filters was installed in the main building in 1949, and the east wing in 1955). The report lamented the fact that the standard of conservation was ‘fairly elementary’ and highlighted the lack of staff and the need for air-conditioning in the exhibition gallery and the storage gallery for panel portraits. The Gallery had no expert technical staff or scientific department and all cleaning and restoration of portraits had to be put out to independent professional restorers. There was a ‘careful and conservative policy of cleaning a few important portraits each year’ (99th Report, 1955-56, 1956).

The Gallery continued to use Holder & Sons for picture restoration. The business was run by William Vallance until 1951 and then by his son Roy, but, according to Adams, they were very slow owing to shortage of staff, and he obtained the agreement of the trustees to trial Eric Goodliffe (qv), a restorer from Bristol who worked in a freelance capacity at the National Museum of Wales. Goodliffe was employed specifically to treat war damage in some portraits, to secure loose paint on others and to put in order William Salter’s small portraits of Waterloo Generals. The verdict was that his work was reasonable but not of such a high standard as Vallance’s (Trustees’ minutes, 23 October 1952, 5 February 1953). Goodliffe’s reports on the work he carried out were rather fuller than those of Vallance and most London restorers.

As to Holder’s, the pictures allocated to them were more challenging, to examine their actions on four acquisitions: remove discoloured varnish, repair damage and revarnish the Daniel Mytens studio full-length Earl of Holland for £60 in 1951; remove discoloured varnish and overpaint, repair and revarnish Nathaniel Hone’s half-length Sir John Fielding for £25 in November 1952; secure blistering paint, iron down cracks, remove most of the discoloured varnish, repair and revarnish the William Larkin studio full-length Duke of Buckingham for £55 in December 1952; and remove discoloured varnish, strip-line the corners, repair and revarnish Sir Godfrey Kneller’s full-length Earl of Oxford for £70 in 1957. Exceptionally, Joshua Reynolds’s William Strahan was sent out to Horace Buttery (qv) in 1961, in view of his expertise in treating this artist’s work.

Technical examination of portraits became more important. This work was highlighted in an exhibition, Altered Portraits, in 1958, mounted around three paintings in the collection, where x-ray or infra-red photography had revealed interesting changes: Isaac Fuller’s Sir William Petty, John Hayls’s Samuel Pepys and Patrick Branwell Brontë’s Brontë Sisters (Trustees’ minutes, 26 June 1958, also 13 December 1956). Considerable care was taken to study two important acquisitions in 1957 before treatment: the Holbein cartoon (see section 4), and the full-length painted portrait of Sir Francis Drake, which was subject to cleaning tests, x-ray photography and cross-sectional analysis (Trustees’ minutes, 24 October 1957).

Charles Kingsley Adams retired in 1964. He was followed by David Piper (1918-90) who had joined the staff in 1946. He served as director for less than three years before moving on to the Fitzwilliam Museum and then to the Ashmolean.

3.2 Sir Roy Strong, 1967-74: Roy Strong (b.1935) joined the staff as assistant keeper in 1959, shortly after completing his doctorate on Elizabethan court pageantry. He was appointed the Gallery’s youngest ever director in 1967. His directorship was transformative.

Strong campaigned for more generous provision for conservation with considerable success. A report was submitted to the Department of Education and Science in 1968 (see Report 1967-75, 1976, p.28). Then in 1969, in campaigning mode, Strong characterised the position over cleaning, restoration, mounting and framing as ‘a truly shocking one’, claiming that since 1945 the policy had been to restore acquisitions and to leave the existing collection practically untouched (NPG, Restorers files). He went on to state, not really accurately, that virtually nothing had been restored or cleaned in the fifty years, c.1895-1945. He described the position as nothing short of outrageous, comparing the Portrait Gallery’s limited resources to the generous staffing at the National Gallery, which had the budgets to maintain a ‘vast’ scientific and restoration studio. The Portrait Gallery did not even warrant an entry in the Gulbenkian Foundation report, Training in the Conservation of Paintings (1972), whereas the National Gallery was listed with seven restorers, two conservation officers, a technician and two trainee restorer vacancies.

Towards the end of his directorship in 1973, Strong explained the Gallery’s position in more measured terms to the Standing Commission on Museums and Galleries (NPG, Registry files). There was a frames technician but no one on the staff who could mount drawings and clean prints although a technician was now, he said, being recruited. Paintings were sent out to commercial restorers since the Gallery was not equipped to handle this work and it would be difficult to find restorers to appoint to the staff. There was a great backlog in cleaning paintings. Few commercial restorers could be found to deal with early paintings which took so long to restore that such work was regarded as unprofitable. There was a good argument therefore for a restorer on the premises if only one could be found.

Funding for national museums was on the increase at this time. As a result of Strong’s campaigning, the conservation budget was increased from £2000 to £5000, and then to £10,000, enabling the Gallery to put in hand a considerable programme of work (Report 1967-75, 1976, p.28). In the years 1967-75, 208 paintings were cleaned, some 20 of which involved elaborate and expensive treatment, notably Master John’s Queen Mary I on panel, cleaned by Lord Dunluce in 1969, and described as a ‘spectacular instance of the results of the cleaning and restoration programme’ (Trustees’ minutes, 16 October 1969) and Rowland Lockey’s Family of Sir Thomas More, cleaned in 1971-3 by Sarah Walden, with assistance from Sophie Plender and also Alan Cummings, following detailed technical examination by Joyce Plesters at the National Gallery.

Plender has described the set-up for cleaning the More Family at the Gallery: ‘There was no studio there then and we worked in the picture store, carrying in our equipment, including solvents, on the underground!’ (Sophie Plender, ‘Memories of Paintings, Paint and People’, The Picture Restorer, no.38, 2011, p.19). Cummings remembers coming in the evenings to retouch under artificial light and does not recall the results with any great fondness but, as with Sophie, it was an introduction to the National Portrait Gallery (Cummings 2009, p.5). By 2011 retouching in the faces had blanched, probably due to the use of anatase titanium white, and needed to be retouched by Helen White and Laura Hinde.

Many Tudor and Jacobean portraits were lent to Montacute House in 1975, with 66 out of the 96 cleaned before going on display (Report 1967-75, 1976). Bettina Jessell thought that the Portrait Gallery was probably her most interesting client and particularly noted the early paintings for display at Montacute (Jessell 1996, p.14). For Cummings and Jessell, see Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, oral history archive interviews (Cummings by Alison Richmond, 2009, and Jessell by Joyce Hill Stonor, 1996).

In the case of oil paintings on canvas and panel, the Gallery continued to employ William Holder & Sons, its restorers of many years, led by Roy Vallance, until 1969 (the business closed in 1974). The Gallery then turned to another long-established family business, William Freeman & Son Ltd (qv), from 1967. When this partnership broke up in 1972, the Gallery continued to use Gerald Freeman but more especially, his younger brother, Clifford Freeman, 1972-81, who through much of the 1970s proved the mainstay of the Gallery’s restoration programme, undertaking both routine and more demanding work.

For a century the Gallery had used restorers such as Haines, Dyer, Holder and Freeman, all family concerns with longstanding expert craft traditions of knowledge handed down from generation to generation by training on the job. As the conservation budget expanded, conservators from quite different backgrounds began to be employed, whether with institutional experience, such as Herbert Lank and John Hargrave, both formerly at the National Gallery, and Lord Dunluce at the Tate, or younger conservators trained on specialist conservation courses at the Courtauld or Gateshead, the former more scientifically based, the latter more practical.

Conservators who worked on paintings in the Strong years include Patrick Lindsay (qv, 1968-69), Herbert Lank (qv, 1968-72), Clifford Ellison (qv, 1968-74), Louis Howard, structural work (1968-72), Lord Dunluce, sometime trading as Dunluce-Rothenstein Ltd with Mrs Elizabeth Rothenstein (1969-77, 1981-84), Peter Booth (1970-72), John Bull, sometimes in partnership with Katharine Reid (1970-76, 1981), John Hargrave, who carried out much work (1970-79), Sarah Walden (1971-84), Clare Wilkins (1971-85), Liza Sacher, later Dunluce (1972-84), Bettina Jessell (qv, 1973-82) and the Courtauld Institute (1973-77).

Roy Strong took a particular interest in the Tudor collection. He encouraged John Fletcher at Oxford University’s Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art to carry out dendrochronology on many of the Gallery’s Tudor panel, 1971-82, with pioneering results (see John Fletcher, ‘Tree ring dates for some panel paintings in England’, Burlington Magazine, 1974, pp.250-8), although the precise accuracy of Fletcher’s annual growth ring chronology was subsequently challenged (see Sarah Bunney, ‘Tree ring dating for paintings is thrown into doubt’, New Scientist, 24 January 1985, p.37). An exhibition on the results of the dendrochronology survey was held at the Gallery in July 1977. Much of this dendrochronological work on Gallery panels has been refined in recent years as part of the ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ project (see section 6).

Strong’s delight in the revelations of picture restoration are apparent from his diaries. On 28 February 1968, he describes going to see Clifford Ellison, ‘who was busily stripping the repaint from the ‘Ditchley Portrait’ of Elizabeth I. The background had been crudely over painted and the blue on the left of the picture concealed a misty pale grey-brown. How wonderful it is to clean the National Portrait Gallery’s pictures, all of which are filthy and untouched.’ (Roy Strong, Splendours and Miseries. Diaries 1967-1987, revised ed., 2017, p.30).

Strong left in 1974 to take up the directorship of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

3.3 Dr John Hayes, 1974-94: Dr John Hayes (1929-2005) came to the Gallery from the London Museum. He was an expert in the work of Thomas Gainsborough. During his directorship conservation became the subject of regular attention in the Gallery’s published annual reports. One of the Gallery’s assistant keepers, Robin Gibson, was selected to take responsibility for conservation, an arrangement that continued until about 1982.

It took time to realise a planned conservation facility in a converted first floor gallery in the Duveen wing but a studio was opened there in 1977, allowing on site supervision of work in progress (Report 1967-75, 1976, p.29; Trustees’ minutes, 10 April 1977). It was relocated to a ground floor gallery (the old ‘Guthrie’ room) in 1981, although the extraction and lighting systems took time to fit, and much conservation work continued to be sent out (Report 1982-83, 1983, p.24; Trustees’ minutes, 19 November 1981, 25 November 1982, 17 February 1983). In 1983/4 the National Gallery terminated the arrangement for undertaking x-ray photography for the Portrait Gallery (National Gallery archive, NG16/156.16) and for a time the Portrait Gallery used a visiting mobile x-ray unit as a substitute until its own facility was set up in 1993. A new lining table was installed at considerable expense in 1988 to replace the existing Willard vacuum hot table (Trustees’ minutes, 19 May 1988). Low reflective glass was fitted in place of ordinary glass on pictures in a sustained but expensive campaign starting in the 1980s.

By the mid-1980s most work was done in-house by Christine Bullick, trained at Gateshead, Sophie Plender, Alan Cummings, Jenny Archbold, Ann Broomfield, Helen White and, from 1990, Andrea Gall, all trained at the Courtauld Institute. Some conservation was carried out by Anton Stanczyk (1974-88) and Tony Reeve (1977-78, mainly structural work). Other freelance practitioners were employed but are not named here owing to the application of the Data Protection Act 2018. For an insider’s view of the freelance system and the series of temporary studios, see Sophie Plender, ‘Memories of Paintings, Paint and People’, The Picture Restorer, no.38, 2011, pp.19-20; see also interview, The Picture Restorer, no.45, 2014, pp.6-9). Despite the quality of work carried out, a problem for freelance conservators of varying experience was perhaps a lack of overall direction and approach, given the number of curators of differing backgrounds working with conservators.

The most unusual conservation task of the period was the repair of Bryan Organ’s recently painted Diana Princess of Wales, slashed and torn in an attack in 1981. It had to be lined by Peter Newman, a specialist in lining, cradling and transfers, and painstakingly restored by John Bull, a conservator of modern paintings (Report, 1981-82, 1983; ‘Case Study’, RP 5408). Bull matched the acrylic medium and technique of the original in consultation with the artist. The most controversial treatment was the cleaning and removal of later paint layers on Joshua Reynolds’s Samuel Johnson in 1976 (see Bettina Jessell, ‘A Study of the Paint Layers of a Portrait of Dr Johnson by Joshua Reynolds’, The Conservator, no.15, 1981, pp.36-40; see also Acquisition histories: Dr Samuel Johnson on this website). Other significant work included Jenny Archbold’s cleaning and restoration of George Hayter’s large Reformed House of Commons in 1977, wax lined by the National Gallery conservation dept (Report 1977-78, 1979, p.16), a picture which was treated again in 2002 by Bush & Berry of Bristol, specialists in large paintings.

It is worth observing how developments in approaches to conservation did not feature in published reports. Such a situation is not unusual but the present author is in the position of having been part of the debate. With works on paper, the viewpoint that works should not be routinely lined and that reports should be prepared on all treatment came to prevail by the early 1990s. With oil paintings, there were many paintings in store which would have to be cleaned before they could be displayed. However, the approach to the collection that portraits should be fed into the conservation studio to maintain a programme of interventive cleaning, and often lining, was one which could be taken too far. A debated example was Gwen John’s Self-portrait, on an unlined fine-weave French canvas, which in the end was refused for overseas loan in 1992 because it would have required lining to travel. A particularly successful straightforward cleaning was George Romney’s small Lady Hamilton, cleaned by Alan Cummings in 1987-88, revealing the bravura of the brushwork.

Some resources were diverted from interventive conservation to preventative work in surveying the collection, by initiating a programme of examination of works not on display at the Gallery, for many of which there was no existing conservation report. Over a period of years starting in the late 1980s, the collection was surveyed in store and on long-term loan to venues such as the Palace of Westminster, the Law Courts and the Gallery’s regional partnerships at Montacute, Beningbrough and Boddelwyddan, and remedial action was taken where appropriate.

In a review paper dated 18 July 1994, drawn up by the present author, ‘Conservation at the NPG’ (NPG43/8/1), both preventative and interventive conservation were discussed and the overall budget at £91,000 identified. On preventative conservation, certain aspects were highlighted: the immense improvements in maintaining environmental conditions, the importance of surveying the collection to enable conservation priorities to be drawn up, the importance of disaster planning and the need to minimize the impact of people on the collection. There had been four water penetration incidents in the previous ten years. On interventive conservation an attempt was made to discuss the Gallery’s philosophy of conservation. Major structural work such as lining and major cosmetic work such as varnish removal would not be done sooner than necessary.

In the run up to the opening of the new ground floor galleries in 1993, the large store for paintings in the Duveen wing was relocated to a new air-conditioned store at Merton in 1992 (Triennial Report, 1990-93, 1993). It was moved to Southwark in 2011 in partnership with Tate. In conservation the crowning achievement of John Hayes’s directorship was the construction of a purpose-built and well-equipped studio on the top floor of the Gallery’s new Orange Street building, which was opened by The Queen in November 1993 (Triennial Report, 1990-93, 1993).

For more recent years, see section 6.

4. Miniatures and works on paper

In the 19th century the collection of works on paper grew with the Henry Martin bequest of portrait engravings (1861), the gift of Francis Chantrey’s studies for sculpture (1871) and the gift from Serjeants’ Inn of engravings and pictures (1877). The treatment of miniatures, drawings, engravings, pastels and autograph letters in the 19th century is discussed here, followed by an examination of paper conservation in the early and later 20th centuries.

Miniatures presented particular problems for George Scharf. From the outset, there is evidence that they were protected from light, as is indicated by a payment for a green silk cover in 1859 for a new acquisition (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1, p.33). In 1863 a recently acquired Hilliard miniature of Queen Elizabeth I was withdrawn from display, suffering from blackening of lead white, a consequence of London’s polluted atmosphere. Following consultation with Michael Faraday and then with his colleague, the leading chemist, Edward Frankland, Scharf treated the discolouration himself with Hydrogen Peroxide, initially with good results (see Queen Elizabeth I by Nicholas Hilliard). The experience of acquiring a very important miniature and seeing it discolour within a couple of years as a result of pollution had an impact on Scharf’s approach to the collection. He continued to seek advice from Frankland, in 1865 asking him to test the paper of his precious sketchbooks for durability against hydrogen sulphide as a pollutant, in 1867 to test what would appear to have been photolithographs produced by a particular process, and in 1879 to examine the permanence of writing in press copy books (NPG7/3/5/2/1; NPG, Scharf Library, XXXIX-C-1, information from Elizabeth Heath; Secretary’s journal, 31 January 1867; NPG2, meeting of 6 February 1880).

Scharf turned to a number of practitioners to treat miniatures in the collection. In 1865 a newly acquired miniature, Moses Haughton’s large Henry Fuseli, was accidentally damaged and written off in an attempt to treat its warped ivory support. This work had been carried out by Charles Tranquille Colette (1825-95), an ivory sculptor, on behalf of the Gallery’s framemaker, Henry Critchfield (Trustees’ minutes, 16 March 1865; Secretary’s journal, 22, 25 February, 18 March 1865). In 1866 when Hilliard's Queen Elizabeth miniature had again discoloured despite Scharf’s earlier efforts, he turned to Guglielmo Faija (1803-73), a miniaturist whom he described as ‘the artist who had successfully restored many of the royal miniatures at Windsor Castle’ (Trustees’ minutes, 12 April 1866; Secretary’s journal, 12-20 November 1866). Faija died in 1873. When work was needed to touch up Camillo Manzini’s recently acquired miniature, Thomas Grenville, in 1879, Scharf employed Frederick William Andrew (qv), an art restorer at the South Kensington Museum and thus conveniently close to the Gallery’s then home (Secretary’s journal, 31 March 1879; Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1, p.105). Scharf was later to use Andrew for cleaning sculpture (see section 5).

Light exposure was a concern, as is evident from the precautions taken in 1885 in displaying a newly acquired miniature, Sir Henry Lawrence. Scharf reported that a ‘green silk casing had been prepared to protect the colours of the original from fading & the miniature at no time to be exposed to too powerful a light’ (Trustees’ minutes, 20 February 1885). Subsequently, Scharf will have studied W.J. Russell and W. Abney’s landmark Report on the Action of Light on Water Colours (his copy, dated in his hand 30 August 1888, is in the Gallery’s library).

Drawings were initially few in numbers and would often be treated on acquisition. Straightforward work would be given to the Gallery’s framemaker, Henry Critchfield, who, for instance, mounted and framed Henry Edridge’s drawing, Robert Southey, on acquisition in 1861 (Secretary’s journal, 3 April 1861). Intriguingly, in May 1871 Critchfield was asked to bring ‘patterns for paper mounts’, perhaps intended for the Chantrey drawings accepted in February that year but not actually mounted for some years to come (Secretary’s journal, 22 May 1871). Critchfield’s successor, Francis Draper, mounted various drawings in the early 1890s, including repairing, removing stains and cleaning Edridge’s Lord Nelson in 1891 (Secretary’s journal, 12 February, 20 December 1890, 9 February 1891, 18 December 1891, 11 January 1892; NPG66/3/1/3 for Nelson). For Critchfield and Draper, see the entries in British picture framemakers.

More ambitious work went to the British Museum, where George William Reid was asked to clean, mount and inscribe a newly acquired Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare in 1864 for 12s (Secretary’s journal, 1 September, 27 October 1864, Trustees’ minutes, 9 February 1865). Once Reid became keeper at the British Museum, his colleague, William May Scott, treated a number of works for the Gallery, repairing a drawing of John Wilkes in 1869, mounting Juan Bauzil’s watercolour Duke of Wellington in 1870 and ‘mounting & smoothing’ Francis Grant’s Edwin Landseer in 1876 (Secretary’s journal, 24 June 1869, 6 October 1870, 31 July 1876).

Caring for the display collection of works on paper was not without its difficulties. Ten years after the Shakespeare engraving had been mounted, it needed refitting because an impression of both the engraving and the lines written below in facsimile had transferred on to the inner surface of the protective glass (Secretary’s journal, 17 February 1875). Perhaps as a consequence, sunk mounts began to be used, initially for a recently acquired pencil portrait of Thomas Gray (Secretary’s journal, 30 August, 12 October 1876). The care of works on paper was beginning to receive more informed attention.

As the collection grew, by the gift of Chantrey’s camera lucida drawings in 1871 and of engravings from the Serjeants’ Inn collection in 1877, the need for access to expert practitioners became even more important. Scharf described the collection of 229 profile drawings by Sir Francis Chantrey as ‘suffering from dust and dirt’ and recommended cleaning, mounting and protecting in portfolios or Solander cases. He made a first attempt to get the work done in 1882 through the Stationery Office on ‘the model adopted at the British Museum’ but in the end he turned directly to Joseph Hogarth & Sons in 1888 to mount the collection, using ‘folding or hinge-mounts’, at the considerable cost of £42 (Trustees’ minutes, 12 July 1882, 22 February 1888; Secretary’s journal, 6 March 1888; Duplicates of Accounts, vol.3, p.11). Hogarth & Sons advertised ‘Specially prepared hand made mounts, free from all chemical & other impurities, for the preservation of water colour drawings’. For this leading business, see British picture framemakers - H.

Engravings in the reference collection, mostly bequeathed by Henry Martin in 1861, were a concern. Perhaps as a result of accepting the Serjeants’ Inn collection of paintings and framed engravings in 1877 Scharf invited the ex-print dealer, George Smith, brother to the Gallery’s late deputy chairman, William Smith, to examine the whole collection in 1877 and to advise on how to improve its condition (Secretary’s journal, 12 May 1877). Scharf then turned once more to the Gallery’s framemaker, Henry Critchfield, who chose to subcontract work on cleaning the Serjeants’ Inn engravings to William Grisbrook (qv), an experienced and well-known London print restorer, the work being done by removing three engravings from the walls at a time (Secretary’s journal, 16 August 1877, 24 April 1878; Trustees’ minutes, 25 July, 27 November 1877; Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1, p.96). In 1883 Scharf approached the Stationery Office again, this time ‘to examine papers adapted for laying down prints in the Martin Collection for reference on an improved system’ but it is not known whether this initiative was followed up (Secretary’s journal, 12 January 1883).

Pastels were treated by the Gallery’s picture restorers. The mould spots on Ozias Humphry’s 3rd Earl Stanhope were removed by Frederick Haines in 1879, while John Reeve supplied tinted glass for John Russell’s Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ‘to tone down the glaring crudeness of the white chalk’, and also worked on William Hoare’s Alexander Pope, both in 1882 (Secretary’s journal, 7 November 1879, 21 July, 28 July 1882). In 1885 three large chalk drawings by Samuel Laurence, which could not be ‘set’, were to be protected by glass in plain wooden frames ‘to prevent rubbing in the portfolios’ (Trustees’ minutes, 2 May 1885). Haines removed mildew and repaired another of Humphry’s pastels, Francis Haward, in 1899 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.4, p.66).

Autograph letters of famous people were for many years displayed in the public galleries to complement portraits on exhibition. Scharf was keen to show the writing on both sides of some documents and in 1883 called in William Grisbrook, as the expert paper splitter, sending him a George Eliot autograph to see if it could be split (Secretary’s journal, 18 June 1883, 29 February 1884). But the real needs lay elsewhere. In July 1884 Scharf had to transcribe the Eliot letter which he noted as ‘unhappily fast fading’ and he then took one of the three leaves off display to serve as a control in assessing fading (Secretary’s journal, 8 July, 5 December 1884).

In the first half of the 20th century, the Gallery used restorers both from museums and the trade for treating works on paper and miniatures: Stanley Littlejohn (1909-13) and John Richard England (1925-42) from the British Museum, and Frank Nowlan (1901-17), William Grisbrook junr (1917-22) and W.J. Holoway & Sons (1923-28) from the trade. The Gallery’s framemaker, Francis Draper, continued to carry out more routine mounting work.

Stanley Littlejohn (qv) probably came to the Gallery’s attention through Lionel Cust’s contacts at the British Museum. He worked for the Gallery on occasion, cleaning and mounting with ‘indurated’ gelatine (a protective sheet) a drawing, apparently Alfred Stevens's Self-portrait, for £1.1s in 1909, treating the Isaac Oliver studio miniature, Henry Prince of Wales, on acquisition in 1910, and restoring John Constable’s pencil-and-chalk Self-portrait and George Richmond’s chalk Cardinal Newman for £2 each in 1913 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.6, p.97, vol.7, p.121; NPG9/1/2/1).

Frank Nowlan (qv) was described by Cust as ‘the well-known expert’ in a report in 1907 to the Gallery’s trustees concerning a disputed drawing (Trustees’ minutes, 7 February 1907). He had already worked for the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam. He undertook occasional restoration work for the Gallery on pastels, drawings, wax medallions, plasters and miniatures.

Littlejohn died in the war in 1917 and Nowlan of old age in 1919. After the war Dr Alexander Scott, the British Museum scientist, provided helpful advice to the Gallery on the treatment of drawings that had suffered during wartime storage (Alexander Scott, ‘Romance of Museum Restoration’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol.80, 1 April 1932, p.496, post-lecture response by C.K. Adams).

‘Skinner’, seemingly an employee of the Gallery’s framemaker, made Whatman mounts for a set of newly acquired drawings by Elizabeth King in 1913 and was recorded as late as 1921 working with Draper (NPG66/4/2/3, Milner’s diary, 10 January, 15 November and 1 December 1913; NPG66/4/2/5, 11 July 1921). Whether through Skinner or independently Francis Draper continued to produce mounts (Milner’s diary, 17 April 1920). Draper also fitted aluminium backs, often with Bristol board, to many of the Gallery’s miniatures, c.1910-12, sometimes also providing a gilt metal oval frame (Duplicates of accounts, vol. 7, pp.22, 45, 59).

There were other post-war practitioners. William Grisbrook (qv), son of the Grisbrook who had worked for Scharf, did work between 1917 and 1922, including restoring six pastels and chalk drawings for £15.17s.6d in 1919, restoring and mounting Gustaf Lundberg’s pastel, 1st Earl Waldegrave, for £4.10s in 1920 and restoring five George Dance drawings for £10 in 1922 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.8, pp.39, 103, 117, 139). William John Holoway (qv) was employed on the recommendation of the miniatures dealer, Danton Guerault; he restored six further drawings by George Dance for £3.3s in 1923, and two warped or broken ivory miniatures for £5.5s in 1928 and a further two large miniatures on ivory by Sir William Ross for the considerable sum of £50 in 1929 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.8, p.152, vol.9, pp.13, 117; RP 2056).

From the mid-1920s the Gallery looked to a British Museum employee, the repairer and mounter John Richard England (qv), who undertook occasional work in mounting drawings in museum quality boards, as well as cleaning, mending and backing prints, 1925-42. For example, he mounted recently acquired drawings in 1932 and 1934, removed the board from Emanuel Horwitz’s Stacy Aumonier drawing in 1935, and mounted various Vanity Fair drawings in 1938 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.9, pp.95, 115; Account book 1935-42; Correspondence file with British Museum, 1929-38; Associated Items, NPG 2777).

It was not only oil paintings that were reduced in size, as outlined above (section 1.2). In 1921 it was decided to reduce ‘to a size suitable for framing and exhibition’ Thomas Heaphy’s newly acquired watercolour portraits of Peninsular and Waterloo officers, which were drawn on larger sheets, and it is only quite recently that these cut-outs have been returned to their original sheets (Trustees’ minutes, 20 October 1921).

Turning to the second half of the 20th century. A much more active approach to the treatment of works on paper was adopted from the late 1960s. Furthermore with the opening of a climate-controlled special collections store in the Orange Street building in 1993, the storage of works on paper has been hugely improved. Prints and drawings, photographs, and miniatures are discussed here.

Work on prints and drawings in the 1950s and 1960s, before Roy Strong’s appointment in 1967, seems to have been minimal, though Strong himself identifies Mrs Isherwood Kay, widow of an assistant keeper at the National Gallery, as mounting some drawings, supposedly in brown paper sheets (Roy Strong, Passions Past and Present, 2005, p.5). Then in the four years from 1967, as funding became available, Mrs Judith MacColum, a freelance restorer of prints and drawings, carried out much work, for example, ‘lifting, cleaning, repairing, sizing & flattening’ Shannon’s lithograph, Max Beerbohm, and also treating many works by Thomas Heaphy. Conservation work on prints and drawings was also carried out by British Museum staff, c.1967-81, including by Michael Warnes (extensive work, 1967-81; he moved to the Royal collection), Geoffrey Morrow (1973-77) and Bryan Clarke (1976-80; he moved to the National Maritime Museum). More routine mounting was done by a local framing business, Blackman Harvey Ltd.

In 1974 advice was taken from Eric Harding, chief conservation officer for prints and drawings at the British Museum, on setting up a paper conservation studio at the Gallery; he provided specifications and suggested that it would be more satisfactory to appoint two conservation officers (NPG66/4/2/15, notes by Caroline Brown, 11 February 1974). For several years in the late 1970s it was reported that a new post of conservation officer for prints and drawings had been approved but this was not followed through and the reality was that freelance paper conservators continued to be employed (Report 1967-75, 1976, p.29; Report 1977-78, 1979, p.17).

An extensive programme of treating and remounting works on paper, mainly drawings, was begun in 1977. Keith Holmes, a freelance conservator trained at Camberwell and formerly at the Area Museums Service studio at the Fitzwilliam, treated some 2900 works over the next eight years. Drawings were often lined, a Gallery practice which was abandoned in the early 1990s and which now seems overcautious (Reports, 1979/80 to 1986/87). Holmes’s special expertise in photographic material was singled out in the Gallery’s 1979/80 report. He continued to work on the collection until about 1992. The most unusual and demanding work was Hans Holbein’s large Whitehall cartoon, Henry VIII and Henry VII, which he conserved with Sheila Fairbrass in 1982-3 (Report 1982-83, p.25; Trustees’ minutes, 17 February 1983; see also Fairbrass and Holmes, ‘The Restoration of Hans Holbein’s Cartoon of Henry VII and Henry VIII’, The Conservator, no.10, 1986, pp.12-16). For the context and changing approaches, see section 3 above and the strategy paper prepared by the present author, ‘Conservation at the NPG’, 18 July 1994 (NPG43/8/1). The viewpoint came to prevail that works should not be routinely lined and that individual reports should be prepared for all treatments.

More recently, Catherine Rickman, a paper conservator trained at Camberwell and then a conservation officer at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, carried out freelance work for the Gallery from time to time. The pastels in the collection were subject to a detailed technical report by Peter Bower, ‘The Papers found in British 18th Century Pastels in the Collections of the National Portrait Gallery’, typescript (1997). The reference collection of engravings was rehoused in new solanders in the new air-conditioned Orange Street building in 1993. A display in 2002, Changing Impressions: A Print Conservation Project in Focus, celebrated the restoration of twelve outsize engravings by Clare Reynolds and led to a detailed description of the process on the Changing impressions page. Since 2013, the Gallery has employed a part-time paper conservator on its staff.

Photographs presented their own problems. A harbinger of the Gallery’s interest was a question from an unidentified trustee in 1950 concerning ‘the preservation of 19th century photographs, particularly those done by Mrs Cameron and David Octavius Hill’, leading the Director to respond that he would make enquiries about available expert knowledge (Trustees’ minutes, 22 June 1950). However it was not until the directorship of Roy Strong from 1967 that the Gallery actively engaged with photographs.

A non-interventive approach to photograph conservation was adopted following unfortunate problems with a few images, notably Richard Beard’s daguerreotype, Maria Edgeworth, treated in 1981. Some work was undertaken by Mary Anne Roberts in the mid-1990s. A conservation survey of albums, loose photographs, cased photographs and negatives in the Photographs Collection was carried out by Alan Donnithorne, then of the British Museum, in 1990, and a further survey of albums by Alice Powell, a freelance paper conservator, in 2011.

The few miniatures that were conserved in the 1950s seem to have gone to the Victoria and Albert Museum for treatment, for example Samuel Cooper’s William Lenthall was sent for mildew to be removed in 1951. The collection was considerably enhanced by miniatures from the Alan Evans Bequest in 1975. The Gallery had a long connection with Jim Murrell (qv), conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, dating back to at least 1967. In 1969 he reported that he would no longer be permitted to undertake private work but thought that the Museum would allow him to treat waxes for an allied institution and indeed he worked on several for the Gallery in 1972 (National Portrait Gallery archive, Restorers files). But his main achievement came in 1976 when he examined the whole of the Gallery's collection of miniatures, providing technical reports, and conserving fifteen of the miniatures (and others as late as 1989) (Report, 1976/77, p.15; Victoria & Albert Museum. Review of the years 1974-1978, 1981, p.93). The dealer, Brigadier Gordon Viner, of Limner Antiques, also treated miniatures on occasion in 1978 and 1986. More recently Alan Derbyshire surveyed the condition of part of the collection in 1997 and Cecilia Rönnerstam undertook a wider summary condition survey in 1999. Both have worked on the collection.

5. The care of sculpture

When it came to sculpture, the overriding concerns in the 19th century were twofold: firstly, finding ways of ensuring the long-term future of delicate plaster busts and casts, leading to the production of electrotype versions and, subsequently, bronze casts; secondly, and the chief concern here, keeping marble and terracotta sculpture clean in the heavily polluted London atmosphere of the time.

In one of the early Gallery catalogues, Scharf identified the production in 1869 of an electrotype by Elkington’s of Henry Weekes’s plaster bust, William Buckland, as producing a work ‘in sound metal of the most durable quality’ (Historical and Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures, Busts, &c, 1888, p.7). These electrotypes were produced by Elkington & Co and the process is discussed at Bronze sculpture founders: a short history. In response to Scharf’s concern about the finished electrotype, Elkington's manager explained that 'the glossy appearance of the surface will soon subside, and be much better after a time than were it now altered. Experience has proved that.' (RP 255).

As to cleaning sculpture, marble busts were maintained in house at first, with Scharf purchasing ‘Chlorate of Lime to clean busts’ in May 1861 and, at the same time, taking preventative conservation measures by protecting busts through in-house production of Brown Holland bust covers (NPG7/1/1/2/2/1, cash book entries). On a visit to Windsor in 1863 Scharf noted how they cleaned busts in the Royal collection, laying on potash and a little hartshorn (a traditional ammonia-rich solution) with no soap, using a hog bristle brush and drying with a sponge (NPG7/1/3/3/4/9, referring to Scharf’s Trustees’ Sketch Book, vol.2, p.60a). Following this, in 1864 and 1865 he made purchases of ‘potash & hartshorn for cleaning busts’, getting two of his Gallery attendants to clean the marbles.

Scharf also employed William Bartlett & Co (qv), 1861-85, who advertised as carvers, gilders, decorators and restorers of works of art and vertu. They charged 12s per day plus travelling expenses, according to a note made by Scharf on their business card in 1864. Initially Bartlett’s work was restricted to terracottas and waxes. They cleaned Roubiliac’s terracotta bust, William Hogarth, for £2.10s in 1861 and restored and ‘delicately tinted’ a terracotta bust of Oliver Cromwell for 12s in 1863. They also restored wax medallions: Peter Rouw’s James Watt in 1864 and again in 1868, and Thomas Engleheart’s Duke of Kent in 1866 (both needed restoring again in 1902, see below). They provided occasional advice on potential acquisitions, dismissing a bust of Isaac Newton in 1864 as a thick plaster cast, rather than terracotta, and another of King Charles I at Christie’s in 1866 as plaster of Paris (Secretary’s journal, 18 March 1864, 8 March 1866). Subsequently Bartlett’s took on the responsibility for cleaning the collection of white marble busts, as well as the terracottas, at two to three year intervals, until Scharf grew dissatisfied with their performance following damage to some of the gilt tablets for busts in 1883 (Secretary’s journal, 19 January 1883). For Bartlett, see Scharf cashbook 1860-68, NPG7/1/1/2/2/1 (6 October 1862, 11 February 1863, 17 February 1865, 23 April 1867, 27 March 1868); Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1, pp.66, 100, vol.2, p.16; business card, NPG7/1/2/3/5; Trustees’ minutes, 6 February 1863, 19 February 1869.

In 1885 Scharf called at the South Kensington Museum, then the Gallery’s neighbour, to ask about their arrangements for cleaning marble busts, and two days later Frederick William Andrew (see section 4), the museum’s restorer of art objects, called to see him (Secretary’s journal, 4, 6 March 1885). Andrew then brought a man with him and cleaned 27 white marble busts for £6.15s (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.2, p.80; Trustees’ minutes, 2 May 1885). After the collection’s move to Bethnal Green in November that year, the Science and Art Department, as the Gallery’s host at Bethnal Green, drew attention to the dirty condition of the marble busts and offered to arrange cleaning at their expense, again employing Andrew (Trustees’ minutes, 10 June 1886). He continued to treat the collection until as late as 1890 when he cleaned a terracotta bust, William Makepeace Thackeray (Secretary’s journal, 6 February 1890) and it is possible that he was ‘the official attendant of the Museum’ who cleaned the busts at Bethnal Green in 1892 (Secretary’s journal, 17 June 1892).

Care of much of the sculpture collection passed out of Andrew’s specialist hands to the Gallery’s framemaker, Francis Draper, who repainted plasters, including Haydon’s John Keats life mask in 1888, and the anonymous Thomas Gray bust in 1889 (Secretary’s journal, 5 June 1888, 4 February 1889). He also provided samples of ‘Argentine’ glazed muslin for covering busts and works of art in 1893 (NPG2, meeting of 19 March 1894). When the collection was moved to St Martin’s Place in 1895-96, the busts and other large pieces were treated by Draper: Chantrey’s Edward Bird bust was painted in July 1895, 46 marble busts were cleaned in April 1896, Joseph Boehm’s full scale recumbent Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, a recent cast in plaster of a monument in Westminster Abbey, was washed and painted with three coats in flat oil in April, and twenty terracotta and plaster busts were washed in May (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.3, pp.97, 115, 117).

In the early 20th century, the sculpture dealers and restorers, Bellman, Ivey & Carter, managed by Charles B. Carter, took on the routine cleaning of the Gallery’s sculpture collection. This business worked for the Gallery between 1902 and 1919, cleaning the whole collection of busts and statuary for £27.8s in 1904, ‘cleaning & stopping statuary’, among which were 44 marble busts, ‘reflatting’ 12 plaster casts and other work for £34.14s in 1906, restoring Chantrey’s Edward Bird, a smashed plaster bust, for £3 in 1908, supplying 13 green marble pedestals for £112 in 1911, the first of several such orders, and repainting a recently acquired cast of James Deville’s life-mask of William Blake in 1919. When a marble bust was damaged in 1917, it was said that the cleaning of busts was work which had been ‘entrusted for many years past to Messrs Bellman, Ivey and Carter’. For this business, see Duplicates of Accounts, vol.5, pp.34, 122, vol.6, pp.17, 20, 37, 72, 78, vol.7, p.34, etc; NPG104/10/3 and British bronze sculpture founders and plaster figure makers.

There were others involved in the maintenance of the sculpture collection. Frank Nowlan (see section 4) treated cracking in two profile portraits in wax in 1902, Rouw’s James Watt and Engleheart’s Duke of Kent, both previously restored in the 1860s, as described above (see RP 183, 207). ‘Mr. Ready’, either Charles Joseph Ready or Augustus Papworth Ready, who did work for the British Museum, cleaned electrotypes in 1913 (NPG66/4/2/3, James Milner’s diary, 20 November 1913). The long-established firm of plaster figure makers, Brucciani & Co Ltd, now with Paul Ryan as managing director, worked for the Gallery, 1912-20, mainly on plaster busts, for example, cleaning and colouring six plaster casts by Thomas Woolner for £3.3s in 1912, ‘Removing old paint & colouring Black Bronze’ George Gammon Adams’ Sir Charles Napier for £2.2s in 1914, and treating in a similar manner 33 plaster casts for £52.16s in 1915 (Duplicates of Accounts, vol.7, pp.79, 112, 134, 150, vol.8, p.42; see also Milner’s diary, 16 April, 24 October, 28 November 1913). For Brucciani, see British bronze sculpture founders and plaster figure makers - B.

If many of the plaster busts in the collection were ‘black bronzed’ in the 1910s, various terracottas were stripped of paint and refinished in the 1920s, seemingly receiving a more radical treatment than would now be considered appropriate. The Victoria and Albert Museum cast department, as successors to Brucciani’s, removed old paint from two terracotta busts, Roubiliac’s Lord Ligonier and the small George Frederic Handel for £5.7s.6d in 1924 (Duplicates of Accounts, 26 March 1924). Two years later the Gallery’s trustees inspected four busts, William Hogarth (terracotta by Roubiliac), David Garrick (plaster after Roubiliac), Charles James Fox (terracotta after Nollekens) and Oliver Cromwell (terracotta after Pearce), ‘which had been stripped and cleaned of their accumulations of paint by the Cast Department’ for £20; the trustees then expressed their approval of the ‘admirable manner’ in which the work had been carried out, work which included recolouring (Trustees’ minutes, 29 April 1926, see also Duplicates of Accounts, 18 March 1926). The Cast Department also repaired Rysbrack’s terracotta, Sir Robert Walpole, for £5 in August 1926 (Duplicates of Accounts, 24 August 1926).

Little information is available about the treatment of sculpture in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the later 20th century, the 1950s and 1960s are poorly documented but by the 1950s apparently the Gallery’s policy was no longer to paint plaster busts but to leave their surfaces alone (M.G. Sullivan, Sir Francis Chantrey and the Ashmolean Museum, 2014, pp.44, 49, source not given).

The Gallery continued to use expert staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum for sculpture with painted surfaces, 1974-90. For marble, terracotta, plaster and lead busts, Peter Smith (Restoration and Reproduction) Ltd was used (1973-82), a business which tackled Rysbrack’s problematic terracotta, George I, at a cost of £198 in 1976, removing thick layered paint from the bust’s unsatisfactory surface, repairing, texturing and colouring, a difficult process. For marbles and other sculpture, Miriam Clifford (1983-84) and two other practitioners carried out work for the Gallery on a freelance basis, 1983-90, but the mainstay for care of the collection was for long Patricia Jackson (from 1984). Much of the work has involved cleaning and minor repairs.

The opening of the new conservation studio in Orange Street in 1993 provided proper facilities for the first time for sculpture conservation. Furthermore, the unsatisfactory storage of marble busts and other large scale sculpture in the Gallery’s East Wing bust store was overcome by the removal of such sculpture to a new collection store at Merton in 1994 and 1997, and more recently to Southwark (NPG43/8/1, review paper, ‘Conservation at the NPG’, 18 July 1994; Report 1997/98, 1998, p.14).

6. Recent years

There have been three directors in recent years: from the Victoria and Albert Museum, Charles Saumarez Smith, director 1994-2002; from Tate, Sandy Nairne, director 2002-15; and from Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nicholas Cullinan, director since 2015.

These years have seen continuing development in the Gallery’s conservation programme. There has been a commitment to conservation, housing the collection and research, as well as to enhancing public access. Richard Hallas has been Senior Conservation Manager since 2009. Various conservators employed in recent years are listed in section 3.3. In addition, Rachel Scott, Polly Saltmarsh and Laura Hinde have worked as painting conservators and, more recently, Abigail Granville and Alexandra Gent. For Hinde’s treatment of a newly acquired panel, Queen Jane Seymour, see the curator's blog.

Conservation in recent years is not the main focus of this history but it is worth identifying four threads. Firstly, the growing professionalization and status of the conservation profession and of conservators working at the Gallery. Secondly, and related, the system of employing conservators in-house on a freelance basis has been replaced by salaried staff appointments, in line with most other large institutions, a development from about 2005 and largely complete by 2009. Thirdly, environmental improvements, particularly the use of LED lighting, installed from 2010, so reducing heat output from lighting in the galleries and making it easier and less energy intensive to maintain stable atmospheric conditions. Lastly, the importance of research-driven examination and conservation.

Two examples of research-led programmes depending on technical analysis are given here. In the mid-1990s the condition and history of picture frames in the collection were surveyed by Richard Hallas and the present author in the run-up to an exhibition at the Gallery in 1996, The Art of the Picture Frame, in which conservation and technique were primary focuses, with a workshop space open to visitors at the centre of the exhibition. From 2007 the ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ project was carried forward (see Making Art in Tudor Britain), culminating in a volume, Painting in Britain 1500-1630: Production, Influences, and Patronage, Tarnya Cooper et al. (eds), 2015, with eight essays on material practice, including the results of extensive dendrochronology on Gallery and other panels (see Ian Tyers’ essay, ‘Panel making, sources of wood, construction “trademarks” and conclusions on their production and trade in Britain’; see also On panel making and the post-1600 Holbein panels).

In the wider sphere, the Gallery website hosts four resources focusing on those who have contributed to the making or restoring of works of art:

British artists' suppliers, 1650-1950, launched 2006

British picture framemakers, 1600-1950, launched 2007

British picture restorers, 1600-1950, launched 2009

British bronze sculpture founders and plaster figure makers, 1800-1980, launched 2011

The Gallery’s current approach to conservation and collections care is summarised in its Collections Care and Conservation Policy. For other current information, see our Conservation pages.

Appendix: Scharf’s visits to restorers’ studios

In the course of his duties George Scharf made occasional visits to picture restorers’ studios, often noting and sketching the works he saw. The following is a partial listing. He visited George Barker in July 1860, January 1861 (when he saw portraits from Hardwick and Raynham), July 1861 (Lord Bristol’s pictures) and February 1863, Smart & Seguier in August 1861 (Col. North’s pictures), Henry Merritt in February and March 1864 (paintings from Hampton Court, intended for Holyrood Palace), October 1864 (pictures from Lambeth Palace), September 1866 (the Westminster Abbey Richard II), December 1866 (Hampton Court and the Society of Antiquaries), April 1867, November 1868, February 1869 (Duke of Norfolk) and April 1874 (Longford Castle and Knebworth), John Lewis Rutley in October 1867, Charles Buttery in March 1871 (portraits by Reynolds), October 1875 (Speaker’s residence portraits) and November 1875, William Dyer in April 1873 (Sir Charles Domvile’s pictures) and September 1887 (Boughton House) and Frederick Haines & Sons in January 1879, November 1883 (Lord Sheffield’s portraits), April 1884 (Lord Sidney’s pictures and Adin Williams’s), April 1886 (pictures from Calcutta) and December 1889, when he saw some of Lord Clarendon’s pictures. See sketchbooks, NPG7/1/3/1/2/19, 20, NPG7/3/4/2/69, 79, 81, 89, 91, 93, 96, 134; Secretary’s journal, 12 August 1861, 18 April 1873, 9 November 1883, 7 April 1884, 25 October 1875, 2 January 1879, 2 April 1886, 5 September 1887.



Alexander Nicholls, 27 Lucas Road, Kennington Park, London 1865, 5 Green St, Leicester Square 1868-1880. Print and book cleaner, printseller.

Alexander Nicholls (c.1823/24-1880) was described by Andrew Tuer in 1882 as the factotum of the more celebrated Edward Evans (qv), print dealer, cleaner and restorer in the Strand, for whom he appears to have worked from the age of about sixteen in 1839 or 1840 until Evans closed his business in 1864. In censuses, Nicholls was listed as age 17 in 1841, age 35 in 1861 and age 41 in 1871, variously described as born in Westminster or Lambeth. He was living with his mother Frances in Lambeth in 1841 and in 1861, when described as a shopman at a printseller, presumably the Evans business. He married Mary Ann Law in 1868 in the Newington district. In 1871 he was living with his wife at 38 Aldred Road, Walworth. He died in 1880, age given as 56, in Kennington Park, leaving a personal estate worth under £300. His prints were sold after his death by Sotheby’s in two sales on 9 February and 12 July 1881.

Nicholls was listed in London directories as a printseller in 1868, and also as a print and book cleaner from 1869. Nicholls’ business card, dated in manuscript 4 November 1865, provides further details: ‘A. Nicholls, Assistant upwards of 26 years to Messrs. Evans, of the Strand, Print and Book Cleaner, Print Splitter & Re-layer of India Proofs, 27 Lucas Road, Kennington Park. S. Engravings and Drawings Inlaid and Mounted. Ink & Stains taken out of prints & books’ (National Portrait Gallery records, NPG7/1/2/3/5). He supplied engravings to the National Portrait Gallery in 1872 (Duplicates of Accounts, vo.1, p.88).

Sources: Andrew White Tuer, Bartolozzi and his Works, vol.1, n.d but 1882, p.93.

Added March 2020
Mark Norman (1949-2019). Head of conservation, Ashmolean Museum, from 1999.

Outside the time frame of this online resource, but see obituary, ICON News, February 2020, no.86, p.16.

Updated March 2018, December 2020, September 2023
Stanley Kennedy North, 47 Bassett Road, London W10 by 1923-1926 or later, 31 Ladbroke Grove by 1931-1942. Artist and picture restorer.

Stanley North (1887-1942) was born on 11 April 1887 and christened as Harry Stanley North at St Luke, West Kilburn on 13 July that year, the son of Charles North, omnibus driver, and his wife Fanny. He was recorded as an art student, living in Fulham in the 1911 census. Later that year, he married Vera Rawnsley in the Kensington district; she would subsequently marry Clifford Bax. He was known as Stanley Kennedy North following his second marriage in December 1920 to Helen Dorothy Kennedy (1889-1975). In the 1921 census he was recorded as an art critic, born in London, living in Kensington and in the 1939 England and Wales Register as a fine art expert.

North was a man of wide-ranging talents and colourful character with many connections. His interests included interior decorative painting and folk music. For an entertaining account of Stanley North’s life, see his grandson, Richard D. North’s website. For his work as an artist and insights into his life, see https://richarddnorth.com/2022/03/skn/, both accessed 30 July 2023. For his second wife, see Hilary Clare, ‘Madam’, Abbey Chronicle, no.6, September 1990. Stanley Kennedy North of 31 Ladbroke Grove died in June 1942, leaving effects worth £970.

North published a number of technical and popular papers on restoration, including 'Old Masters: Their Scientific Preservation', International Studio, August 1930, pp.22-5, ‘The Framing of Valuable Large Pictures’, Burlington Magazine, vol.61, 1932, pp.12-13, and 'Pictures are not only Art', The Nineteenth Century and After, vol.122, July 1937. His work investigating paintings scientifically was featured in an illustrated article in 1929 (‘X-ray diagnosis of art’, The Sphere, 16 March 1929, p.507).

North was occasionally in contact with the National Gallery. In 1929 he received permission to x-ray the Wilton diptych on the premises (National Galley archive, NG1/10, p.97). He was paid £10.10s in December 1930 for a ‘micological’ examination of G.F. Watts’s Life’s Illusions (Tate) and £25 in November 1931 for an unspecified x-ray (NG13/1/11). In December 1931 North contacted the Gallery’s director, Augustus Daniel, to express alarm concerning the Kenwood pictures but Daniel’s diary note makes it clear that he had no high opinion of North and his theories of restoration (National Library of Scotland, Acc.9769, 97/42, 9 December 1931).

Restoration work: In a post of 14 March 2022, ‘Stanley North: Artist, conservator and ruralist’ at https://richarddnorth.com/2022/03/skn/, Richard North asks of his grandfather, Stanley Kennedy North, ‘Where, how and from whom did he pick up the painting restoration/conservation skills which had produced a practice worth media attention by 1929? Where did he get his chemical and photography skills? Where did he get his X-ray equipment and experience, when both were still uncommon?’ Answers to these questions are not as yet forthcoming. Richard asks whether the Arts and Crafts champion W.R. Lethaby may have influenced Stanley Kennedy North’s role as a paintings conservator, given North’s training under Lethaby at South Kensington, reported in Studio (no.271, October 1915). In The Times in 1929, North was described as having been working for several years at the use of X-rays and ultra violet rays in understanding old master paintings (‘Tests for old masters’, The Times, 11 February 1929).

North was entrusted by C.H. Collins Baker, Surveyor of the Royal Collection, to work on pictures in the Royal Collection but his largely untried and expensive methods led to difficulties, with King George V sceptical about North’s approach (Millar 1977 p.209). Among works in the Royal Collection, North cleaned Duccio’s tryptych in 1930 (Shearman 1983 p.94) and relined the Mantegna cartoons at Hampton Court, 1931-4, using a wax adhesive (Andrew Martindale, The Triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court, 1979, pp.119-22).

North’s work at Petworth, where he cleaned three paintings by Turner in the 1920s, was seen as so disastrous that Lord Leconfield decreed that no further pictures should be touched in his lifetime (Blunt 1979 p.119).

North treated some pictures in the collection of the Duke of Sutherland, including wax lining Titian’s Venus Rising from the Sea in 1931 (National Gallery of Scotland) and x-raying, wax lining and cleaning Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto in 1933 (National Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland; see S. Kennedy North, ‘Titian’s Venus at Bridgewater House’ and ‘The Bridgewater Titians II’, Burlington Magazine, vol.60, 1932, pp.58-63 and vol.62, 1933, pp.10-16; Humfrey 2004 pp.95, 160; Jacqueline Ridge and Marika Spring, ‘The Conservation History of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, vol.36, 2015, pp.116-23 for North’s detailed treatment record).

For Samuel Courtauld, North cleaned Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Renoir’s La Loge (both Courtauld Institute of Art; see The Times 26 September 1934); his work on the latter was subsequently criticised by Kenneth Clark, who implied in 1939 that he had overcleaned the man’s head when discussing further cleaning by Helmut Ruhemann (qv) (British Library, Add.MS 52434 f.18).

North was responsible for conserving watercolours by John Sell Cotman in the collections of Russell J. Colman, 1934-7 (now Norwich Castle Museum) and S.D. Kitson (The Times 19 September 1936, 6 July 1937, see also Miklós Rajnai, John Sell Cotman, 1782-1842: early drawings (1798-1812) in Norwich Castle Museum, 1979, p.36 etc). His work on the Colman collection, including the provision of framing and special cabinets cost £7800 (Miklós Rajnai, John Sell Cotman: Drawings of Normandy in Norwich Castle Museum, 1975, p.44).

North lined various paintings now in Norwich Castle Museum, using his patent metal stretcher, including Cotman’s The Silent Stream in c.1935 (also transferring the painting from board to canvas), and Moreton Hall, The Judgement of Midas and The Waterfall in 1936-7. He framed The Beggar Boy with an unattached trellis support across the back, a technique he used on the Colman collection watercolours; the date of this work is unrecorded but it was presumably at the time that he attempted removal of a full size drawing of Cotman’s The Judgement of Midas from the reverse, but destroyed it in the process. He declined to treat View from Yarmouth Bridge for the Colmans, writing in 1939 that he could not solve the problems with the painting, only do something to preserve it. The above information has kindly been provided by Rose Miller, May 2012, from museum conservation records.

Sources: Obituary, The Times 23 January 1942. For abbreviations, see Resources and bibliography.

Added March 2019
William Nixon by 1830-1835, Nixon & Son by 1837, Eliza Nixon by 1839, Charles Nixon by 1843-1862. At 5 Navigation St, Birmingham 1830-1841, 109½ New St by 1843-1847, 85 New St by 1849-1850, 10 Steelhouse Lane 1850-1862. Carver and gilder, picture and glass frame manufacturer, picture dealer and restorer.

Charles Nixon (b. c.1811/16) was a leading carver, gilder and picture dealer in mid-19th century Birmingham. It was probably William Nixon, presumably his father, who began the business. In 1850 Charles claimed that the business had been established in 1820. This was when he advertised, as a carver and gilder, picture and glass frame manufacture, that his business had relocated from 85 New St to 10 Steelhouse Lane, opposite the Polytechnic Institution (Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 24 June 1850).

In census records Charles Nixon can be found in 1841 in Navigation St with his wife Sarah, in 1851 in Steelhouse Lane as a carver and gilder, age 35, with his wife Sarah and daughter Violetta, and in 1861 at the same address, now as a picture framemaker, age 50, born in Bath, with his wife and daughter.

Nixon was made bankrupt three times, firstly in 1849 as a glass and picture framemaker, secondly in 1862 as a carver, gilder and picture framemaker and thirdly in 1865, again as a carver, gilder and picture framemaker (London Gazette 10 August 1849, 3 October 1862, 30 January 1866). A sale of his pictures and drawings, picture frames and mouldings, etc, took place after his bankruptcy in 1862 (Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 18 October 1862).

Work as a picture framer, dealer and restorer: Charles Nixon was employed by the leading Birmingham collector, Joseph Gillot, from 1847 until 1860 (Chapel 2008, see Sources below). It is likely that Nixon is the man who left the impressed mark, C. NIXON/ PICTURE LINER, on the stretcher of David Cox’s Sketch from Nature, 1847 (Bonhams, 4 July 2017, lot 14). In 1856 he advertised as a picture restorer, offering upwards of 300 ancient and modern paintings for sale, which he stated that he had purchased from the Tong Castle and others sales (Birmingham Journal 17 May 1856).

Sources: Jeannie Chapel, ‘The Papers of Joseph Gillott (1799–1872)’, online appendix, p.7, Journal of the History of Collections, 2008, vol.20, pp.37-84

Joseph Francis Nollekens, London from 1733, Dean St (later no.29) 1737 to 1748. Landscape, figure and conversation piece painter and picture restorer.

Joseph Francis Nollekens (1702-48) was sometimes known as 'old' Nollekens, to distinguish him from his better-known son,Joseph Nollekens the sculptor. He came to England in 1733. According to George Vertue, writing following his death in 1748, ‘Nollekens’ was born in Antwerp and educated in painting by his father and then when he came to England he worked with his fellow countryman, Peter Tillemans. As a Catholic, he married Mary Ann Lesack or Lesacque at the Sardinian embassy, 3 May 1733, and their children were baptised at the chapel of the Venetian ambassador: John Joseph in 1735, Joseph 1737, Maria Joanna Sophia 1739, James 1741 and Thomas Charles 1745 (National Archives, C 112/183, Chancery, Master Rose's Exhibits). His children are probably the subject of a pair of his small children's portraits, one dating to 1745 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven).

Nollekens lived in Dean St, near Soho Square, from 1737 to 1748 (Survey of London, vol.33, St Anne Soho, 1966, p.135, available online at www.british-history.ac.uk). He died at his house, leaving behind a widow and children (Vertue vol.3, p.137; London Evening Post 21 January 1748). His collection of prints, books of prints, and drawings was sold in 1751 (London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette 4 November 1751).

Nollekens was extensively employed at Wanstead by Richard Child, Earl Tylney of Castlemaine. In 1742, he submitted a bill for cleaning and mending pictures for the Howard family (Sotheby's, English Literature and History, 16 December 1996 lot 102). ‘Noliken’ is recorded as a buyer at a picture sale in 1744 (‘Sale catalogues of the principal collections of pictures..., 1711-1759’, vol.2, ms, V&A National Art Library, 86.OO.19).

Sources: Vertue vol.3, p.137; Croft-Murray 1970 p.249; M.J.H. Liversidge, 'An Elusive Minor Master: J.F. Nollekens and the Conversation Piece', Apollo, vol.95, 1972, pp.34-41. For abbreviations, see Resources and bibliography.

Updated March 2022
Peter Norton, Soho Square, London from 1819, 14 Greek St 1822, 22 Soho Square 1824-1857, 25 Soho Square 1844-1868. Picture dealer and restorer.

Peter Norton, ‘the eminent connoisseur in pictures and other works of art’, as he was described in 1834 (Morning Chronicle 6 January 1834), was a leading collector and dealer and also an occasional picture restorer.

Peter Norton (c.1782-1868) came from a well-known Bristol family. John Sell Cotman drew portraits of ten members of the family in 1800 (Sotheby’s 30 November 1978 lot 50), including Peter Norton I (1729-1813), Peter Norton II (1755-1832) and, treated here, Peter Norton III. The latter was baptised in Bristol in 1782, the son of the bookseller and stationer, James Norton and his wife Sarah Lansdown, also depicted by Cotman. It is difficult to be sure which ‘P. Norton’ was the subject of portraits by William Haines, H.W. Pickersgill and E.H. Baily, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1809, 1817 and 1823 respectively. Peter Norton III was the uncle of James Lansdown Norton (c.1803-1848), who set up as a printseller and artists’ materials supplier in Birmingham. For James Lansdown Norton, see British artists' suppliers - N. These family connections and related information have kindly been supplied by Jenni Butterworth, November 2021.

Peter Norton’s only child, Adelaide, married William Manson at St George Hanover Square in 1840 (Morning Post 25 September 1840). Manson was a partner with George Henry Christie in the auction house, Christie & Manson. For many years Peter Norton owned or occupied both 22 and 25 Soho Square. In census records he can be found in 1841 at 22 Soho Square, as a picture dealer, age 58, and in 1851 and 1861 at 25 Soho Square, described in 1851 as a proprietor of houses, born in Bristol, unmarried but with his sister and niece, and in 1861 as a picture dealer, by now age 78. He died in November 1868, age 86, described as late of 25 Soho Square, leaving effects of under £30,000, a considerable sum; his will and three codicils were proved by two of his executors, his nephew, John Norton, architect of 24 Old Bond St, and his niece’s husband, Joseph Townsend of Bristol.

Activities as a dealer and restorer: ‘Mr P. Norton’, presumably Peter Norton, went to the carver and gilder, John Smith (see British picture framemakers - S), for new picture frames, frame repairs and some pictures and a drawing, 1814-9 (V&A National Art Library, John Smith ledgers, 86.CC.1). He is possibly the Peter Norton, gentleman, found at 8 New Inn, Middle Temple, 1818-20, and before that described as a tea dealer from Gloucestershire in 1812. He offered pictures at auction on occasion, including on 20 March 1823, in 1842 and 1849 (Lugt 16532, 19219). In 1857 he unsuccessfully offered a portrait of Nat Lee by Dobson, together with a Reynolds self-portrait, to the newly founded National Portrait Gallery (National Portrait Gallery records, volume ‘Offers 1857 to 1864’). Following his death in November 1868, four sales of his collection of more than 2000 pictures and other objects were held by Christie’s in January and February 1869, with a final sale in February 1870.

In 1824 Hugh Irvine, nephew of the dealer, James Irvine of Rome, recommended Norton at 22 Soho Square as a picture cleaner to Sir William Gordon Cumming for the collection at Altyre (National Library of Scotland, Gordon Cumming of Altyre papers, dep.175, section II, box 162(2), information from Helen Smailes). Irvine described Norton as a restorer whom he had employed frequently and had always found him to work well and to be moderate in his charges, adding that he had just successfully cleaned six pictures belonging to Marischal College in Aberdeen.

Added January 2017, updated March 2022
George William Novice. In London: 4 Hawick Place, Vauxhall 1825, London Road 1827, 27 Lant St, Borough 1828, 41 Lant St 1830, 2/3 Edward St, Vauxhall Road 1833. In Edinburgh from 1833/34: 1 Blenheim St 1834, 20 Cumberland St 1837-1838, 18 Cumberland St 1839-1846, 1 Windsor St 1847-1849, 3 Comely Green Crescent 1849-1856, 10 North St Andrew St 1857-1867, 2 Malta Green Place 1869-1873. Artist, picture restorer and author.

George William Novice (1805-73) comes from a family of obscure artists, originally from Kent. He was born 9 December 1805 and baptised at St George the Martyr, Southwark, the son of William Novice and his wife Ann Harriet, née Twelves, and the grandson of George Novice. His father was described as a cabinet maker at the birth of son Henry in 1808 but as a painter at the birth of daughter Caroline in 1810, and indeed he began exhibiting at the Royal Academy from an address in Bermondsey in 1809 and held an account with Charles Roberson from 1820 (Woodcock 1997). George William Novice exhibited genre pictures in London, 1824-33, and at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1834-71. An example of his work is Pigeons at a Dovecot, 1823 (Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, National Trust). He studied at the British Institution in 1832 (Art Journal, vol.6, 1854, p.207).

Novice moved to Edinburgh in 1833 or 1834 but visited London for a few weeks each year until 1844 (Art Journal, vol.6, 1854, p.207). He can be found in Edinburgh Post Office directories as an artist from 1847 but as a picture restorer in Slater’s directory for 1861 (National Library of Scotland, Scottish Post Office directories). He married Isabella Pate on 1 January 1847 at St Mary’s, Edinburgh (see www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/). He had letters published on picture varnishing in The Art-Union (vol.9, 1847, p.397) and on the National Gallery Select Committee report of 1853 in The Art Journal (vol.6, 1854, pp.207-8). He published Frauds and follies in picture dealing, etc. A poem in 1859 and Lights in art: A review of ancient and modern pictures, by an artist in 1865, with an appendix, The present state, treatment, and preservation of oil paintings (accessed through Google Books), with a 2nd edition in 1874.

Novice can be found in Edinburgh census records, always with his wife Isabella, in 1851 at 3 Comely Green Crescent as an artist restoring old pictures, age 45, born England, in 1861 at 10 North St Andrew St as an artist, age 55, and in 1871 at 2 Malta Green Place as an artist restoring old pictures, age 65, born London. He died at 2 Malta Green Place in 1873, his age given as 67, his wife named as Isabella Pate and his mother as Harriet Twelves.

As a picture restorer, he cleaned, restored and varnished a Netherlandish panel, Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery of Scotland), then owned by the Royal Institution of Scotland, for £10 in 1840 (National Records of Scotland, NG3/5/43). He was in correspondence with the Royal Institution in 1847, unsuccessfully offering to repair Tiepolo‘s Finding of Moses (NG3/4/22/4).

Updated January 2017
Frank Nowlan, 187 Euston Road, London 1866-1870, 10 Parliament St, Dublin 1871-1872, 115 Grafton St, Dublin 1874, 17 Soho Square, London 1872-1898, 8 Percy St, Tottenham Court Road 1899-1919, home The Elms, London Road, Cheam, Surrey by 1881-1911 or later. Artist and restorer of miniatures, drawings and works of art.

Frank Nowlan (1835-1919) was born in or near Dublin in 1835. He is said to have settled in London in 1857 and to have studied at Leigh’s School of Art and the Langham School of Art. He was recorded in the 1861 census as a miniature painter, age 24, lodging at 49 Warren St and as an artist in subsequent censuses. He married Susanna Haxley in 1861 at St Pancras Old Church. In the 1871 census they were living at 187 Euston Road and in 1881 at the Elms, London Road, Cheam, his age given as 43, with three daughters. One of the daughters, Carlotta, exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1894-1900. By 1907, Nowlan was described as ‘the well-known expert’ by the director of the National Portrait Gallery in a report to his trustees concerning a disputed drawing (Trustees’ minutes, 7 February 1907). He appears as an artist painter, with his wife Susanna, as having been married 49 years, still living at the Elms, in the 1911 census. He died in 1919 at the age of 84 in the Epsom district, leaving effects worth £449. Several of his works were included in a posthumous sale held at Forster’s on 23 July 1919 (The Times 21 July 1919).

Nowlan exhibited in various exhibitions in London and Dublin from 1866 to 1916. He was listed as an artist from 1882 to 1915 in Post Office London trade directories. He is said to have been patronised by the Royal Family and he is also said to have invented the unforgeable cheque. He gave his portrait, drawn by Frederick Walker at Leigh’s School in 1858, to the British Museum in 1911 (British Museum collection database).

In 1958 the National Portrait Gallery was offered two miniatures, one of Frank Nowlan by his daughter Pauline, the other by him of his other daughter, Carlotta, but they were declined as not of sufficient importance (National Portrait Gallery, Trustees’ minutes, 17 April 1958, p.314).

Restoration work: Nowlan restored a drawing for the British Museum in 1899, Bernard Orley’s The Parable of Dives and Lazarus (A.E. Popham, Catalogue of Drawings by Dutch and Flemish Artists… in the British Museum, vol.5, 1932, p.34). The same year, he donated a print by Edward Burne-Jones, apparently the artist's only known lithograph (British Museum, 1899,0706.1, information from Sheila O'Connell). He repaired a Cooper miniature for the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1900 (Fitzwilliam Museum Library, Management Syndicate minutes, 1 May 1900). He undertook extensive work on miniatures at the Wallace Collection, 1901-10, at a cost of some £165 in all (Wallace Collection Archives, AR2/50Q; see also Graham Reynolds, Wallace Collection Catalogue of Miniatures, 1980, p.28). He was described in 1922 by D.S. MacColl, Director of the Wallace Collection, as the ‘well-known miniature restorer’ (Burlington Magazine, vol.40, 1922, p.234).

Nowlan undertook occasional restoration work for the National Portrait Gallery, 1901-17, on pastels, drawings, wax medallions and miniatures, including renovating William James Müller’s miniature Self-portrait in 1902 for £1.1s, restoring Ozias Humphry’s pastel, 3rd Earl Stanhope, for £4.4s in 1904, and cleaning James Deville’s plaster head, William Blake, for £2.15s in 1919 (National Portrait Gallery records, Duplicates of Accounts, vols 5 to 8). He also repaired and copied George Romney's pastel, William Cowper, in 1905, shortly before its acquisition by the National Portrait Gallery (see Ingamells 2004 pp.127-8 and n.12).

For the leading collector, George Salting, Nowlan restored miniatures, 1900-7, including a Cooper in 1900 for £2.2s and a Cosway for £7.7s in 1907 (Guildhall Library, Salting bills, MS 19473/1).

Sources: Daphne Foskett, A Dictionary of British Miniature Painters, 1972, p.425.

Found a mistake? Have some extra information? Please contact Jacob Simon at [email protected].

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