Bedroom secrets

It is fascinating to experience how The bedroom painting is continually transformed from one stage of treatment to the next. This photograph made after cleaning shows the painting in it’s, perhaps least flattering, so-called ’stripped state’. 

The bedroom photographed in 'stripped state', after removal of old layers of varnish, overpaint and fillings.

Removing old fillings

The slow process of removing old fillings and overpaint, millimeter by millimeter, has taken several weeks to complete. The old oil paint restorations proved highly intractable; though a water-based solvent gel could be used to dissolve some of the most superficial overpaint, most of the old restorations had to be split off layer-by-layer using a surgical scalpel under the stereo-microscope. This process was tedious yet highly rewarding in terms of the amount of original, undamaged paint surface that has been recovered from underneath past layers of restoration.

Fragile

At this stage, the physical nature of The bedroom painting as a fragile object predominates over the illusion of the pictorial image. Looking ahead though, there is now a clear basis from which to start reconstructing the image by careful filling and inpainting of the disruptive losses.

Detail of The bedroom in 'stripped state'. Paint losses are clearly visible now the old retouches have been removed.

Two details of Traas’ retouches of damages in the floor, seen through the microscope after varnish removal. Darker purplish stripes adjust the peachy color of the first layer.

Colour change in the retouches of Traas

There is enticing evidence that, within his own life time, Traas was confronted with the consequences of colour change in the floor due to faded Geranium lake. This is suggested by the two-step build-up of his retouches in damaged areas, consisting of purplish stripes applied on a peachy underlayer (see images above). The peachy base colour closely resembles the colour of a strip of original paint preserved along the bottom edge of the painting that was formerly covered by tape and hence protected from light since 1931 (see image below).

Detail after varnish removal showing peachy strip of original colour preserved along the bottom edge that has been protected from light.

In other words the peachy retouches applied by Traas in 1931 must have formed a good match to the original colour of the floor at the time. The top purplish layer of retouching however, approximates the discoloured tint of original paint that has changed towards purple since 1931. The purplish retouches must have been added by Traas when he ‘completely  reworked’ The bedroom painting, as an invoice dated 15 October 1958 records. This reworking seems to have involved the adjustment of his own retouches applied just 27 years before, to compensate for colour change that had occurred in the interim period.

Ambition

About one month before he painted The bedroom, Van Gogh wrote about his ambition to advance the cause of modern art through his expressive use of colour:  ‘. . . and then the study of colour. I still have hopes of finding something there. To express the love of two lovers through a marriage of two complementary colours, their mixture and their contrasts, the mysterious vibrations of adjacent tones.’

Combinations with other works

A comment that does much to clarify Van Gogh’s view of colour and emotion is his idea that The bedroom would contrast with The night café . As already noted, Van Gogh – while waiting for Gauguin to arrive – was working on a large group of related works that he wanted to use as decoration for The yellow house. For this reason, as soon as he had finished one painting, he would often immediately start thinking about appropriate combinations with others. In these combinations, the diverse dramatic effects of different colours often played a decisive role.

Vincent van Gogh, The night café, 1888

Vincent van Gogh, The bedroom, 1888

Evoke emotions

This certainly applies here. In The bedroom as well as in The night café, Van Gogh set out, with the aid of a carefully targeted choice of colours, to evoke the emotions that he experienced in a particular environment. These emotions were as different as day and night, as were the images themselves. Van Gogh used the ‘pale violet’, the ‘red tiles’ and the ‘fresh butter yellow’ to express the ‘utter repose’ that he experienced in his simply furnished, light bedroom. When he made the painting, Van Gogh had just been compelled to rest quite literally for a while, after a period of uninterrupted painting to complete the decorations of The yellow house before Gauguin’s arrival.

The night café, on the other hand, was a place, wrote Van Gogh, ‘where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes.’ Human passions, in other words, which Van Gogh translated into ‘a battle and an antithesis of the most different greens and reds.’

Icons

Personally, I do not think it is a coincidence that precisely these two works have grown into icons of modern art. Van Gogh successfully used colour to convey his emotions to the viewer with whole-hearted conviction.

Influenced by Delacroix

In Blanc’s handbook Van Gogh also read about the application of Chevreul’s theories by the Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). Delacroix applied the principle of optical mixing by composing his blocks of colour from strokes of complementary colours placed next to each other. In addition, he also created contrasts between the blocks of colour as a whole, for instance by colouring the walls of a building orange under a blue light. Van Gogh was greatly influenced by Delacroix’s use of colour.

Using colour to reinforce emotions

So Delacroix based himself on the scientific theories of Chevreul, but Van Gogh believed that this artist also used colour quite deliberately to evoke a specific atmosphere and to reinforce emotions. Van Gogh wrote passionately about Delacroix’s famous painting Christ asleep during the tempest: ‘Ah — E. Delacroix’s beautiful painting — Christ’s boat on the sea of Gennesaret, he — with his pale lemon halo — sleeping, luminous — within the dramatic violet, dark blue, blood-red patch of the group of stunned disciples. On the terrifying emerald sea, rising, rising all the way up to the top of the frame. Ah — the brilliant sketch.’

Eugène Delacroix, Christ asleep during the tempest, c. 1853

A contribution to modern art

It is striking how Van Gogh describes the colours in Delacroix’s painting in terms of their emotional impact (‘blood-red’, ‘terrifying emerald’). In the next post, I’ll show that he described the colours in his own work in similar emotionally-charged terms. Van Gogh saw his use of colour as one of the most distinctive qualities of his work. He deliberately set out to build on what Delacroix had achieved in this area, and hoped that his personal adaptation would constitute his contribution to modern art.

Van Gogh described the colours that he had carefully selected for The bedroom in a letter to Theo:

‘The walls are of a pale violet. The floor — is of red tiles.

The bedstead and the chairs are fresh butter yellow.

The sheet and the pillows very bright lemon green.

The bedspread scarlet red.

The window green.

The dressing table orange, the basin blue.

The doors lilac.

. . . The frame — as there’s no white in the painting — will be white.’

Although there were in fact red floor tiles in the room, Van Gogh certainly did not base this choice solely on reality. Together, the colours violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red made up the chromatic diagram or ‘colour wheel’ devised by the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786-1889).

Chromatic diagram or 'colour wheel' of Chevreul

Optical effects

Van Gogh read about Chevreul’s colour theory in the handbook Grammaire des arts du dessin, architecture, sculpture, peinture (1870) by Charles Blanc. Blanc described Chevreul’s theory of the optical effects achieved by placing specific colours next to each other as ‘the law of complementary colours’. Chevreul emphasised that the perception of colour is influenced by the adjacent colours and tones. In particular, opposing colours in the colour wheel (blue-orange, purple-yellow and red-green), which are therefore the farthest apart (complementary colours, as they are known) reinforce each other if they are placed next to each other. 

Using complementary colours

Van Gogh was greatly influenced by this colour theory as a young artist, while he was still in the Netherlands, but it was not until his time in France, when he came under the influence of the Parisian avant-garde, that he started to place pure complementary colours next to each other.

What is more, like the Impressionists (and Neo-Impressionists) he opted for a white frame to complete the work. According to Chevreul’s theory, that white frame, or the use of white in the picture itself, is an essential element of the work. He wrote: ‘If white is placed next to a colour, the latter emerges strongly, as if the white light, which weakens the intensity of colour, had been removed.’ In addition, white may be seen as a pause, a place in which to ‘recharge’ the eye for the intense experience of all those complementary colours.

Consequences of the discolorations

Now that we know how important the use of colour was to Van Gogh in painting The bedroom, we also have a better realisation of the dramatic consequences of the discolorations for the work’s expressiveness. Although it is still a masterpiece in all its beauty and vigour, the artist’s original intentions have largely been lost.

Another striking detail in the floor that is more apparent after cleaning, is a green patch of shadow under the left stool. The green is more prominent than was originally intended though, due to the fading of a peachy layer that must have covered it to a large extent. Only a vestige of this orange-pink colour survives where a strip of the painting was folded over the left side of the stretcher in 1931 and hence been protected from light since that time.

Detail through microscope of peachy colour preserved where strip of floor folded over left side of stretcher

Two tiny damages on the protected strip expose an even brighter orange-pink below the paint surface, which must give a good indication of how spectacularly vivid the colour looked when applied. This reminded me of a closely comparable detail on the side of Van Gogh’s Daubigny’s Garden (June 1890) where the faded pigment (mixed with lead white in the ground) has been identified as an eosin-based lake known as Geranium lake.

Tiny damages reveal a brilliant pink colour preserved beneath the paint surface.

Indeed this synthetic lake pigment turns out to be the culprit of colour change in The Bedroom too. Muriel Geldof, colleague scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, will write a blogpost spot on how analytical techniques were able to confirm the use of this pigment.

 
A contradiction in terms

In the case of The Bedroom painting, it is clear that the idea of recovering an ‘original’ surface through varnish removal is a contradiction in terms, since this no longer exists and moreover, we cannot know exactly how it looked. This shared predicament is a reason for discussion among conservators who may vary in their approach towards treating paintings of this kind.

 
No varnish, matt varnish or behind glass

One possibility is to re-varnish paintings after cleaning with a varnish layer that contains a small amount of wax. This so-called, ‘matt varnish’ will act as a protective layer that will even out the surface without creating gloss. Another option is to leave pictures unvarnished after cleaning, exhibiting them behind protective glass instead. A select approach is also possible, involving local adjustment of saturation and gloss in different colour areas as deemed appropriate. In the case of The Bedroom, the final choice of treatment method will be postponed until after cleaning, when the overall condition of the paint surface can be properly assessed.

Detail through the microscope during varnish removal from the 'Bedroom' floor. The image upper right half shows the glossy effect of the old, browned varnish. The varnish is removed in the matter, lower part.

The Bedroom protected by glass

However, bearing in mind that the picture will be protected by glazing, it is preferred not to apply a new overall varnish layer that might again require the use of solvents to remove it at some time in the future. Still, it is likely that some local adjustment to even out differences in surface gloss will be required, as in the vermilion bedspread where the old glossy varnish cannot be entirely removed for safety reasons.

Detail through microscope of glossy varnish on the vermilion bedspread. Note too the tiny black letters from transferred newsprint.

Besides its yellowing effect, another reason to remove the aged varnish layer from The bedroom painting is to recover the unvarnished look intended by the artist. As Fleur outlined in her blogpost ‘matte surface and modernity’, Van Gogh’s preference to leave his paintings unvarnished in order to preserve a matt surface was in keeping with that of other modernist painters of his day.

Varnished for the first time

Jo van Gogh-Bonger (1862-1925), Vincent’s sister-in-law and early custodian of his works, was quite adamant on this point. Correspondence records that she was vehemently opposed to the idea of allowing his works to be varnished, with ‘even the thinnest layer’. Indeed, it was not until after Jo died that The bedroom appears to have been varnished for the first time, by restorer J. C. Traas in 1931. The thick and glossy character of the varnish applied by Traas is now considered especially inappropriate however.

Removal of the varnish

Whilst removal of Traas’ varnish is intended to recover an unvarnished look, the question is how exactly should the picture surface look after treatment? As any artist knows, the surfaces of oil paintings are rarely even, but enlivened by local matt-gloss variations instead. Even before a painting leaves the easel, its surface can start to change as lean areas of paint ‘sink’ and become matt, whereas oily ones may develop a glossy ‘skin’. In addition, later treatments by conservators, including lining, varnishing and varnish removal, all impact the surface quality of the painting to some degree.

Naturally aged but untreated

Only very few pictures have escaped such interventions. One example is Van Gogh’s The Garden of Saint Paul’s hospital (November 1889), providing a unique visual reference for how a painting by the artist looks today in a naturally aged, but untreated state: 

Vincent van Gogh, The Garden of Saint Paul's hospital, 1889, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Detail of The Garden of Saint Paul's hospital

To varnish or not 

Now that we have to decide whether or not to re-varnish The bedroom once the restoration is finished, art historical issues have to be taken into consideration. For instance, it is important to find out what Van Gogh himself thought about varnishing. Curiously, he said very little about it. In letters he wrote from Arles, he wrote a few times about his preference for absorbent canvas. This kind of canvas absorbs the oil binding medium from the paint, producing a dry, matte effect. On the other hand, in one of the letters he wrote to Theo in 1890, he asked his brother to varnish one of his works.  He also advised the art critic Aurier to give one of his paintings ‘a good coat of varnish’.

Matte surface 

Most of the paintings Van Gogh produced in France originally had a matte surface. We know this, because several of them were untreated and therefore handed down to us ‘pure’: each one of these has a matte surface. It seems likely that Van Gogh agreed with his modern artist friends: almost without exception, they rejected the varnishing of paintings. Around 1888, matte surfaces stood for modernity. 

Van Gogh and his contemporaries deliberately went in search of a matte effect. By not varnishing their paintings, they distanced themselves from the smooth and shiny finish that was still customary at the time. This was one of the ways in which they promoted their image as modern artists. 

A painting with varnish: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The birth of Venus, 1879, oil on canvas, 300 x 218 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Parijs

Painting in the open air 

These avant-gardists also stopped describing the sketches in paint (impressions) they made en plein air as studies; instead, they referred to them as independent works of art. They no longer concealed their rapid, sketchlike working method beneath countless thin layers of paint and varnish; on the contrary, they now felt that this method should be visible. 

In addition, painting en plein air imposed many demands in terms of materials and techniques. Artists would prime their support (canvas, panel or paper) with an absorbent ground, and liked to work with diluted paint that dried easily. This enabled them to work rapidly. 

While in the academic tradition, a matte surface had always signified ‘unfinished’ and was seen as inferior, in this period a matte surface was seen as one of the features of modern painting!

A painting without varnish: Emile Bernard, Boy sitting in the grass, 1886, oil on canvas, 40 x 33 cm, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Stichting)

Detail of matte surface

Hidden details

Removal of the yellowed varnish, which tends to veil subtle transitions in colour and tone, has revealed previously hidden details in The Bedroom interior. One example is the play of light entering through the rear window and casting patches of light and shade onto the ‘red tiled’ floor, which is critical to the mood of the painting.

The artist described the bedroom with ‘closed shutters’, yet behind the dark green window frame one can see yellow stripes of sunlight in between the pale green shutters and the left shutter seems swung open at 45 degrees.

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Detail of rear window after varnish removal. Yellow sunlight filters through the light green shutters.

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As removal of the yellowed varnish revealed, the pink floor is detailed with whitish streaks where struck by beams of sunlight penetrating the shutters. The brightest highlights in the floor were strengthened by thick strokes of zinc white applied at an early stage of painting, as the x-ray shows.

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Detail through the microscope of underlying, thick strokes of zinc white paint in the floor. After removal of the yellowed varnish.

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Underlying, thick strokes of zinc white in the floor show clearly in the x-ray. The black spots are areas of paint loss.

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Under the left stool is a light emerald green patch of shadow, whereas pale blue shading is present under the bed. Interestingly, these details of light fall in the live study, derived from direct observation, are absent from the two later copies of The Bedroom painting.