AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

The Panel Studio at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) have been collaborating on the treatment of the YCBA’s only painted depiction of the Tudor monarchs—An Allegory of the Tudor Succession (ca. 1590) by an unknown English artist. The painting’s large size (four by six feet) and the complexity of issues in its Baltic oak support required specialized structural treatment that, in the United States, is only currently available at The Met. This paper focuses on the methodology of the structural treatment and what was learned about the painting’s original construction and previous restorations.

An Allegory was taken off view in 2022 so that YCBA conservators could examine it using noninvasive techniques including microscopy, X-radiography, ultraviolet and infrared imaging, and x-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning. The process revealed detailed information about the paint layers as well as the degree to which the painting had been previously restored. Dendrochronology was undertaken on the panel support to answer questions about two boards that had previously been cut across the grain, to the left of the figure of Elizabeth I. The evidence suggested that the tenting paint, lifting fills, and misalignment in the composition were related to issues in the wood support.

The painting was moved to The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Panel Painting Studio in 2023. Previous structural restorations were carefully reversed. This included removal of modern battens glued over the joins—which had caused splits and disjoins in the oak support, removal of thick layers of dark shellac using solvent gels, and separation of the five boards plus the two fragments that had been cut apart previously. Once separated, more than fifteen linear feet of splits were repaired using V-shaped oak wedges, and almost fifty feet of gluing faces were cleaned and prepared for rejoining. Each rejoin required many hours of careful fitting and adjusting to perfect the surface level and create a continuous surface conformation. Once the choreography required to achieve this was perfected, it was practiced numerous times so rejoining could be done in under 20 minutes—the working time for the adhesive. The area where the two boards had to be butt-joined, and four corners leveled, was particularly complicated. On the reverse, where the original wood had been cut away to receive modern battens in the early twentieth century, aged oak was cut to infill these losses and shaped to follow the original tool marks still present. Finally, a custom curved strainer was built to match the original stepped construction on the back, employing spiral spring tensioners to provide tailored support.

This collaboration highlights the complexity of issues when undertaking the treatment of large, thin panel paintings, and current methods of structural conservation, which continue to evolve. The successful treatment of An Allegory of Tudor Succession depended on numerous discussions and in-person visits between Kristin, Jess, and Alan, and the efforts of both institutions' communications teams to document and share the treatment.