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Relined, Restored, Craquelure, Understanding Condition
Every antique painting carries the marks of its own age. Craquelure is not damage, a relined canvas is not a compromised one, and old restoration is normal. Knowing which condition issues matter and which are simply the evidence of time is the most useful skill a collector can acquire.
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| Age, not damage | Fine craquelure, a yellowed varnish, gilding worn to the bole on a frame, old worm holes in a panel. These are what two hundred years look like, and their absence on a picture said to be old is the thing to question. | |
| Care, not damage | Relining, an old restoration, a cleaned surface, a replaced stretcher. Somebody looked after this painting. A relined canvas has been given another century of life, and most surviving eighteenth-century pictures have had the treatment. | |
| Damage, and we say so | Lifting paint, a loss, a tear, heavy repaint over the artist's work, an unstable surface. These change what you are buying, and every one of them is stated in our condition field and shown in a photograph. |
Flat against lifting
Craquelure on an Antique Oil Painting |
Craquelure is the fine network of cracks that forms in a paint layer as it ages. It is not a defect. It is the natural consequence of oil paint drying, contracting and responding to two centuries of temperature and humidity, and its pattern is one of the ways specialists date and authenticate a work.
Its appearance varies with the technique and the support. Italian panels of the fifteenth century often show a fine, regular grid. Dutch canvases of the seventeenth century a wider, more irregular web. French eighteenth-century oil paintings a network of medium cracks following the direction of the brushwork.
Flat craquelure is normal. Lifting craquelure is a job for a conservator.
However visible the network, if the paint lies flat the picture is stable. Cracks with raised edges, where the paint has begun to cup or flake, are the one distinction worth learning.
An act of preservation
What a Relined Canvas Means |
Relining means bonding a new canvas to the back of the original, usually with wax resin or glue paste, to support a weakened support. For canvases more than two hundred years old it is common and usually beneficial. The original canvas becomes brittle, and the new backing prevents tears, stabilises the paint layer and allows the picture to be handled safely.
A high proportion of surviving Old Master paintings have been relined at some point, many of them in the nineteenth century when the practice became standard. A well-executed relining, done by a competent restorer with reversible materials, preserves the work without altering it.
What to look for. A relined canvas should lie flat, with no distortion or bubbling. The original tacking edges are sometimes preserved and folded, sometimes trimmed. A skilled relining leaves the paint surface untouched. A crude one can flatten impasto or leave the surface unnaturally smooth, which is why the reverse of a picture is worth as much attention as the front.
Three operations, one test
Restoration, and How to Read It |
Almost every antique painting has been restored at least once. The question is not whether, but how well and how much.
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| Cleaning | Removes darkened varnish and surface dirt. A well-cleaned painting reveals its original colours. Over-cleaning removes glazes and thin upper paint layers, and it is irreversible. | |
| Retouching | Fills small losses with new paint. Good retouching is minimal, reversible and confined strictly to the loss. Heavy overpaint that extends beyond the damaged area is a different matter. | |
| Ultraviolet light | The professional test. Recent retouching fluoresces darker than the original paint, and old varnish glows a milky green. Serious dealers examine their pictures under UV as a matter of course, and disclose what they find. |
Three levels
What to Accept on an Antique Painting |
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| Perfectly normal | Stable craquelure across the surface. Professional relining. Small, well-executed retouching. A yellowed varnish that could be cleaned. Frame wear consistent with age. | |
| Worth examining | Extensive retouching in the principal areas, particularly a face or a signature. Lifting or flaking paint. Evidence of a tear or a puncture. Wax residue on the surface from an old relining. | |
| Serious | Large losses in the central composition. Overpaint covering substantial areas of original work. Structural instability of the support. Any of these should be visible in the listing photographs and stated in the condition report. |
How we describe it
In Practice |
An honest condition report describes what is there, and a photograph shows it. We photograph the reverse of every painting we sell, and the condition field says what the photographs show, including what a buyer might rather not read.
The reverse in particular is worth studying. It carries the evidence of relining, of the stretcher, of old labels and inscriptions, and it dates the support when the style dates nothing.
| → | The next questionAnd what the front of the canvas tells you?Where to look for a signature, how to read it, and the three signatures that are not by the artist. |
