Image on reverse of painting support

Anne Bacon <anne.bacon [at] unn__ac__uk> writes

>I am currently researching the possible causes of a recently
>observed phenomena. Three textile supported paintings have come into
>the conservation department recently which display transfer images
>on the reverse--something my colleagues and I have never observed
>before.

I observed large quantities of a black, dye like material, perhaps
similar to what Perry Hurt describes, on the back of a canvas
painting from Mozambique dating from the 1980s. Mozambican artists
often use a priming consisting of a mixture of acrylic paint and PVA
glue and on this painting there was a thick, black underlayer
covering the whole canvas beneath the upper paint layers. I used a
locally available (in Mozambique) brand of PVA glue for some work on
the painting's stretcher and found that a black substance leaked
almost immediately from the glue into the adjacent wood. I therefore
wondered if the black staining which I observed on the back of the
canvas was related to PVA glue in the priming, possibly in
conjunction with the black paint in the underlayer if Perry Hurt's
case is related to mine. I don't know what ingredient in the PVA
glue was causing the production of the black substance, but I would
be interested to know if anybody could tell me what it may have been
and whether my theory is plausible.

Lara Wilson
Intern, Victoria and Albert Museum


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 18:56
                  Distributed: Saturday, June 4, 2005
                       Message Id: cdl-18-56-004
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