This portrait, painted by an unknown artist, is one of the many pieces of artwork that make up part of the Chesterfield Museum collection.
Rosa Markham, born in 1840, was the fifth daughter of Joseph Paxton, the famed gardener and architect responsible for the design of the Crystal Palace built for the 1851 Great Exhibition. In 1862, she married Charles Markham, a Chesterfield based industrialist and their family moved to Tapton House in 1873 where they stayed until 1925.
Their son Charles Paxton Markham became the founder of Markham and Co., while their daughter Violet, was a key social figure and went on to become the Chesterfield’s first female mayor in 1927.
Not much was known about the history of the painting, other than it came to Chesterfield Museum from Tapton House School in 1991 and was in need of significant restoration.
Use the menu below to read about the conservation works carried out on the painting and discover how this portrait was skilfully brought back to life.
The painting was in an unstable condition.
A lot of tacks on the left side and right side of the painting were loose, missing or rusted which meant part of the tacking margins was detached from the stretcher. The canvas had, therefore, expanded and contracted unevenly with moisture from the environment and - after a long period of time – this had caused severe quilting and buckling on the four corners and especially on the right side of the painting.
The canvas had become slack and sagged and developed stretcher bar marks on the surrounding edges.
The varnish of the painting was ageing and seriously yellowing.
Lots of areas, especially the dark background, were covered by heavy inpainting which left an uneven lustre on the surface.
It caused not only serious visual disturbance but also more severe deterioration through ageing. In certain areas, especially the edge where the frame covered the painting, lots of abrasions and paint losses were visible and the ground layer was exposed.
There were also drying cracks near the hands of Rosa Markham and some ageing cracks all over the painting but, luckily, they were all stable.
Three holes were found on the painting. One of them was in the middle under the central stretcher bar and a small piece of fabric was missing. The others were on the bottom stretcher bar which we speculated were caused by nails hidden between the canvas and the stretcher that punctured the painting from the reverse side.
During the technical examination, conservators not only gained a lot of information about the damage which might not be seen to the naked eye under the normal light but also found out some interesting stories hiding behind the painting.
There was not much information on the painting itself. We could only reconstruct the story of the portrait from the figure, Rosa Markham, herself and the information from the museum. According to the record, it was painted in the 19th century by an unknown artist who left a signature of A.C.T on the bottom right of the painting.
However, after a little bit of digging, we gained some interesting information which would prove vital to helping us complete the lost part of the story behind the painting.
On the back of many paintings, there are canvas stamps showing which company produced the original canvas that the artist used.
The stamps can help us estimate when the painting was painted, and thus narrow down the list of possible artists. According to the canvas stamp on the reverse of the portrait of Rosa Markham, the canvas was produced by George Rowney & Co (now known as Daler-Rowney Limited) between 1848 and 1923. We then referred to the canvas stamps database from the National Portrait Gallery https://www.npg.org.uk/assets/files/pdf/research/artists_materials_9_Rowney.pdf. We compared the records of stamps on other paintings which were made by the same company at that period of time.
This investigation unearthed some interesting information and suggested that the canvas was produced and sold between 1904 and 1920. This means that, while the painting could have been painted after 1920 (on a canvas the artist had bought earlier), it could not have been painted before 1904. Thus, the information from the stamp provided us with an approximate period when the painting should be dated and therefore an indication of whose work it might be.
However, there were still lots of questions we need to try to answer. For example, whether the portrait was painted when Rosa Markham was still alive (she died in 1912), and whether it was definitely painted by the same artist who painted the portrait of her husband, Charles, also in Chesterfield Museum.
The conservation treatment started and the first thing we needed to do was to clean this very dusty painting.
The painting was covered by lots of dust and dirt which was not only on the surface but also inside the gap between the canvas and the stretcher.
The bottom edge was the filthiest area and we even found several pieces of broken stretcher keys and nail fragments stuck inside, which could harm the painting with their sharp edges.
Take a look at what we found and what we did to clean it!
During cleaning, several tools were used, including a long and flexible feather, different sizes of brushes, a museum vacuum cleaner, a plastic scraper and a lot of smoke sponges.
The smoke sponge is a soft natural rubber sponge which can be cut to suitable angles and sizes to help remove residual deposits of dust, soot and other soiling on canvas fibres.
Let’s see how different it is after dry cleaning...
The structure of a painting is very important, because it’s the only thing that’s supporting the layer of paint, and so that’s what we focused on and dealt with in this blog post.
The tacking margins (the outer edges of the canvas that are attached with metal tacks around the sides of the stretcher) of Rosa Markham’s portrait were in a really bad condition, especially along the sides. A lot of tacks were missing or loose and some of them had even broken off and fallen down between the canvas and the stretcher bars, which caused several holes and dents on the bottom edge. In the photo taken under raking light, it can be seen clearly that the loose edges affected the tension of the canvas quite seriously. It clearly caused ‘quilting’ in the paint layer, starting from top right corner to the bottom edge, and also several lumps on the canvas.
So, for the first step, the painting was removed from the stretcher, and those tacks which were unstable and broken were removed. The reverse side of the canvas was cleaned before being strip-lined with a layer of Beva Tex.
This is a support made of non-woven fabric and adhesive, which helps to strengthen the fragile and torn edge of the canvas and prevent it being damaged when the canvas was re-stretched back onto the original stretcher. The tension of the painting was then able to be adjusted into an appropriate condition using the stretcher keys, which widen the joints around the edge of the stretcher.
Some of the lost or damaged keys were replaced with new ones, which had been laser-cut to the right size and tinted with natural dye to get a uniform appearance on the reverse of the painting.
As mentioned in the previous blog post, there was a puncture in the middle of the painting which caused small amounts of paint and fabric losses, and the surrounding area was slightly distorted/deformed. It was flattened with a heated spatula and patched with a piece of Beva Tex from the back. The edge of the patch was cut into a circular zigzag shape in order to reduce the pressure to the canvas when the materials aged in the future.
Take a look at the results...
A painting conservation project would not be complete without satisfying videos of the old varnish being removed to reveal the true colours of the portrait underneath.
Please enjoy these clips of the delicate process that restored Rosa to her former glory: