Gombrich vs National Gallery restorers

The world’s foremost art historian has delivered a withering attack from the grave on the National Gallery.

"World's foremost"? Gombrich was an eminence, but that's a bit much.

Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich . . . condemned the gallery’s restoration of paintings in letters written between the 1980s and his death three years ago at the age of 92. In the correspondence, to be published for the first time next month, Gombrich claimed that research from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles supported his view that the gallery’s over-enthusiastic cleaning of Old Master paintings had robbed them of their depth of colour.

Attacking the gallery’s staff as "arrogant", "cocksure" and "supercilious", he wrote: "It is now clear that the position I took 49 years ago in this matter has been vindicated."

He had been publicly silent since the 1960s, when he was criticised by the gallery for challenging its removal of varnish from Old Master paintings in an attempt to restore them to their original condition. . .

Gombrich was excited when Getty researchers in America unearthed evidence showing that many of the harsh blue skies and raw bright faces to which the public had become accustomed in restored Old Masters, including those on show at the National Gallery, would originally have been veiled by glazes or tinted varnishes that muted the tones.

Getty researchers discovered remnants of amber varnish on a 1622 masterpiece by Orazio Gentileschi, Lot and His Daughters, in its collection. They said that, where the varnish had been damaged or removed, "it looked as if the final layer of modelling had been ripped from the surface".

The Getty’s research, which was made available only in the year before Gombrich’s death, contradicted the view held by museum establishments in Britain and America that the chemical removal of old varnish and patina was essential "to get back to the original". . .

He wrote to Sarah Walden, a leading British conservator, about his concerns over the National Gallery’s restoration policy. She is publishing his letters in a new edition of her book, The Ravished Image. . .

She cited Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne as a notorious example of insensitive restoration. She said that its colours looked “ludicrously brighter than bright” when recently hung alongside other “sensitively restored” Titians from Italy and Spain.

From the Times of London.

Posted by David on November 1, 2004 12:33 PM