Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/102

92 clean off the old one. Olive-oil does not dry properly, but it becomes sticky after long exposure to the air, and nothing could be better calculated to catch and retain dust. The wisdom of our ancestors made them rejoice in coats of varnish applied thickly over dirty pictures, to lock up the dirt between the paint and the varnish, and so preserve it for the delight of posterity. Our ancestors liked dingy pictures, and the dirtier they were the better they seem to have liked them. The President of the Irish Academy, in a witty speech that I regret not to have kept, said that in Ireland at the present day the public taste required that a picture should be very black, and that it should not cost more than six pounds. Now, dirt is a great help to darkness of complexion, as we all know by the faces of dirty boys in the streets, and, if darkness were considered a merit in these boys, it would be a great mistake to wash them.

The question of picture-cleaning is one of the most complicated that can be. Suppose you leave a very dirty picture as it is, do you see, can you possibly see, what the artist painted? Assuredly not; and why should decent people tolerate dirty pictures when they will not tolerate a dirty table-cloth? The answer is that, if the picture could be cleaned as safely as the table-cloth it would be done without hesitation, but that cleaning may possibly remove light glazes and scumblings along with the varnish, and that if these glazes, the finishing work of the artist, are once removed, no human being on earth, except the artist who painted the picture, can replace them. But, by the time a picture urgently wants cleaning, the painter has generally been for many years in his grave. Therefore, in having a picture cleaned you are risking that which can not be replaced. All this has been said before, but the arguments for and against picture-cleaning have usually been presented in a controversial manner by strong partisans of one side or the other, and, as I am not at all a partisan in the matter, I may be able to state the case more fairly. The choice of evils is this: To escape from the certain evil of leaving a picture concealed by the dirt upon it, you expose it to the possible evil of removing the finishing glazes. Anybody who has painted a picture knows what a disaster that is. The degree of the disaster varies with different artists, according to the importance of the glazes in their system of work. To remove the glazes, even partially, from a Titian is to destroy the picture, because he glazed a great deal, and what we all know as the rich Titian color required that method for its production; but, when a painter has used a more direct method, painting the intended color at once, or nearly so, then the removal of a glaze does not destroy the character of the picture, though it may diminish its beauty and charm. To remove a glaze, in any case, is to put the picture back from a finished to an unfinished state; this is exactly what is done, and the degree of destruction is in inverse ratio to the degree of advancement attained in that unfinished state. But, if the picture