Wood tacks

Meaghan Monaghan <mmonaghan<-at->thewalters<.>org> writes

>At Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark in 2013 we have discovered
>something very interesting while doing technical research and
>conservation treatment on five 17th-century flower paintings by
>Elias van den Broeck (Antwerp 1649/50-Amsterdam 1708).  Two of the
>five paintings appeared to be mounted on their original stretchers
>and have wood tacks/pegs holding the canvas to the stretcher. ...

I have seen wooden tacks, or what I would describe as square pegs,
on two different paintings dating a century earlier by Abraham
Bloemaert.  One I treated in 1992 was a small canvas painting of the
Madonna stretched on a 4 membered strainer.  The strainer was had
half lap corner joins, each held together with 4 tapered, round
pegs.  As the strainer was being lifted away from the canvas to
treat the stretcher bar cracks and tears on the tacking margins, the
corners were found to be loose, having never been glued, it could
have been effortlessly dismantled though it was not.  A similar
stretcher and peg stretching was shown to me on a Bloemaert in
Cologne Germany.  I believe it was at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. I
will send you a couple of photos of the Madonna.

Robert Proctor
Whitten and Proctor Fine Art Conservation
1236 Studewood Street
Houston, TX 77008
713-426-0191 (phone/fax)


                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 28:30
                  Distributed: Sunday, January 4, 2015
                       Message Id: cdl-28-30-002
                                  ***