First, do no harm
Christmas trees, pencils and toddlers can be harmful weapons when combined with paintings. Victoria Marston meets the woman giving the kiss of life to damaged works of art
Victoria Marston meets artistscientist Sally Marriott, who gives paintings the kiss of life
Using an implement designed to remove a cornea, she separates damaged fibres
IN a floaty blue dress, teamed with pom-pom earrings and lacquered blue nails, Sally Marriott looks every inch the artist. Indeed, if you met her in her studio, surrounded by paintings of various sizes, you would be forgiven for making the assumption. However, look closer and you’ll see that the works around her, on easels or leaning against walls, are all complete.
Look again and you might spot a tiny tear in one, the fact that the colours in a portrait are, on the top half of the canvas, murky with age and varnish, whereas, on the bottom, they’re vibrant and clean.
Also here are microscopes and metal tools, resulting in a strange studio-cum-laboratory effect. ‘I’m basically a doctor for paintings,’ says painting conservator Mrs Marriott, who works both in private practice and at the Watts Gallery-artists’ Village at Compton in Surrey. ‘Most of the pieces I work on privately are unglazed, so can end up with tiny scratches across them—mostly from people brushing against them or catching them with something such as a Christmas tree. These scratches would rarely get through the varnish to the paint and can usually be buffed out or retouched, but sometimes…’
Have you ever been warned not to point at something in a gallery? It may seem pedantic, but it’s surprisingly easy to cause a huge amount of damage—during her career, Mrs Marriott has had to deal with the results of someone who was nudged from behind when doing just that, as well as ‘a perfect hole through a canvas made by a pencil’.
It is for cases such as this that Mrs Marriott’s microscopes and tools—which, she explains, are the same as those employed by dentists and surgeons—come into play. Using the pointed ends of an implement designed to remove a cornea, she delicately separates the damaged fibres of the canvas and painstakingly weaves them back together—if they’re still in a state to do so. With older paintings, an impact can cause the canvas simply to turn to dust. Then, she might introduce fibres from other old canvases, new threads or whatever will best replicate what once was.
Once any damage has been patched up, colour matching is next on the agenda. Mrs Marriott shows me a jar of clear resin and the pigments she mixes in to create her own paints. ‘Specialist conservation materials are often incredibly expensive, so where industrial ones can be used, they are,’ she reveals. This resin is used for spraying cars and road markings. ‘It’s designed to be hardwearing and robust, so it’s ideal.’
Replicating texture on larger areas of damage is a further challenge. ‘It doesn’t matter if the colour is exactly right if the texture isn’t there. It will always look flat and you’ll see it straight away.’ The resin-paint won’t build up in the same way that, say, oils would, but the effect can be achieved by taking an impression from an area of undamaged paintwork with putty—again, the same as that used by a dentist to make a mould of your teeth.
So why not simply touch up an oil painting with oil paints? ‘Anything we added would quickly age to a state where it would match the original paint,’ Mrs Marriott elaborates. ‘Then, you would never be able to remove it.’ Anything she or any other conservator does must be able to be removed at a later date if desired, without causing any damage to the original paint surface—first, do no harm.
The job doesn’t only involve dealing with disaster. Much of it is maintenance, protecting pieces against the ageing process and helping to reinstate their former glory. The aforementioned half-clean portrait is a longterm project. ‘It’s not currently deemed fit for display, so I come back to it when I have nothing more urgent,’ Mrs Marriott says, pointing out patchy areas of paint where those before her have rubbed a little too hard.
Cleaning away the layers of discoloured varnish might take two hours per square inch. It’s complicated by minute fragments of soot, carried on the smog of Victorian-era London, which are embedded in the layers of varnish. This appears to have been mixed with beeswax or similar, a magnet for any impurities that had once been floating past.
Listening to Mrs Marriott talk about the precise nature of the chemicals she uses and the balancing act of achieving just what she needs for each job, you realise she isn’t an artist, she’s a scientist. More accurately still, she is both. ‘I wish someone had told me earlier that it was possible to combine the two,’ she says with passion. ‘I wasn’t exactly the black sheep, but as the artsy one in a family of scientists, I was different.’ As she points out, the structure of the UK school system makes it difficult to study both Arts and Sciences past GCSE age.
Mrs Marriott studied BA History of Art, fell in love with Renaissance art on a placement in Venice and then enrolled on a Masters degree in History of Art and the Material Science of Paintings at UCL, gaining much of the scientific knowledge required for a career in conservation. Finally, she won one of only five annual places on the three-year Conservation of Easel Paintings course at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
‘The first 10 years of my career were hard —I would likely have earnt more working in a supermarket,’ she confesses. Of her classmates at the Courtauld Institute, two went to work in the USA, where galleries are privately funded. ‘There’s more work over there and more money in it.’
In 2016, Mrs Marriott was appointed the first de Laszlo Conservation Fellow at the Watts Gallery. Today, all the paintings around her are by the great George Frederic Watts, to whom the gallery is dedicated, but, on two days a week, she works for both public and private collections through her business, Surrey Conservation of Paintings.
She also carries out research projects. ‘Mary Watts’s diaries and surviving letters written by the artist mention that George would sometimes rub potato and onion juice over his paintings. They just didn’t fully describe why.’ By attempting to re-create these circumstances, Mrs Marriott thinks she may have found the reasoning behind such a seemingly strange pastime. The onion was perhaps used to get an impression of how a longterm project might look once the colours had been saturated by varnish—or simply to create a smooth, silky surface on which to apply the paint. The potato may have been to create a matte, starchy layer and absorb excess oil from the already under-bound, chalky paints that Watts favoured.
You might think this sounds like futile work, that there’s no way she can possibly know for sure, but you’d be wrong. ‘By taking tiny samples of paint from his work and looking at them under the microscope, I hope to be able to establish whether starch is present. If it’s there, it should be obvious,’ she enthuses, quick to assure me that the samples taken will be of the smallest amount possible, as anything further would be vandalism. I’m intrigued to know if the potato technique will prove real. You should visit her studio and ask —she’ll be delighted to tell you all about it.
Sally Marriott gives talks at the Watts Gallery-artists’ Village, Thursdays at noon (01483 810235; www.wattsgallery.org.uk)
She isn’t an artist, she’s a scientist. More accurately, she is both