Page:Joseph Drew - Art Treasures and their Preservation scan.pdf/6

94 believe we could point to canvasses not wanting in the beauty and passion of Raphael, the sweetness of Correggio, the triumphs of Titian, the cool silvery transcripts of Ruysdael, or the golden sunsets of Cuyp—the mellowness of tone, which time alone can bestow, being the only element wanting to render many of them worthy of the admiration bestowed upon their early rivals. But will these modern efforts of the painter's art bear the same test of years as their predecessors have done? We have a melancholy foreboding—amounting almost to a moral certainty—that they will not. Now, the old masters were chymists as well as painters; they were no tyros in the mysteries of the crucible and alembic; they knew from personal investigation, much thought, and direct experience, the nature and durability of the pigments they were using. Under their own supervision were their canvasses and panels grounded—under their own immediate direction were their colours selected and their mediums prepared. No element of care was wanting, no precaution neglected to make their works, not only worthy of their name to posterity, but durable in the highest degree. The artist colour-man, with his prepared canvas at so much per yard, coated with whiting and size, and his tube colours, and megilph, so neatly put up, but which will not bear the action of light of a few years, was unknown in these early days; and it was not until the productions of this particular branch of trade were made competitive in price, and cheapness became the order of the day, that decay commenced its ravages, and the durability of paintings could no longer be relied upon. In examining the preparation on some panels of the 15th century, we found the surface upon which the picture was painted much harder than the panel itself, whilst in modern panels it is quite the reverse. In the early panels the surface broke with a gelatinous kind of fracture, the edges of which were sufficiently hard to cut the fingers, whilst in the modern panels a fracture of the surface presented a soft marley appearance, and the preparation itself could be crumbled by friction or pressure. It appears then that this want of solidity in the preparation of canvasses and panels permits the colours to sink in, it extracts the medium in working them, and thus the pigments become so non-elastic, that as the panels and canvasses contract or expand by the atmospheric changes so prevalent in this variable clime, so the colours are rent in all directions, and the fine network of cracks which we so frequently observe spreading over the surface of a picture would appear to be the first step towards its decay. Then in the metropolis, painting are hung in rooms were the air becomes highly vitiated by the presence of large assemblages of human beings and by the pernicious influence of gas, and this is a very