Paintings conservator Genevieve Silvester's work on a 400-year-old painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger has turned up a few surprises for its Auckland Art Gallery owner. Photo / Michael Craig
The happy nuns cavort at a village fair. Are they dancing? Are they playing a game? Wait. Is one of them ...? Yep. One of those nuns is definitely not wearing undies.
The cleaning and restoration of a 400-year-old painting from Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s permanent collection has revealed some rude surprises. There’s a bare-bummed nun, a man defecating and another urinating. A rooster is, well, roostering.
But who hid the naughty bits? How were they uncovered? And why were they painted in the first place?
The woman with at least some of the answers is Genevieve Silvester, the paintings conservator who has been working on this 17th-century Flemish masterpiece, on and off, for the past three years. In February, as the project neared completion, she shared its story with Canvas.
A Village Fair was painted in Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Antwerp workshop in the 1600s and has been in the gallery’s collection since 1960, when the Mackelvie Trust purchased it at a Christie’s auction in London.
“It’s a favourite,” says Silvester. “Everyone loves looking at all the details. But, as you can see, it’s quite dark.”
Or, at least, it used to be.
Silvester is standing in front of two versions of A Village Fair - the cleaned original, and a life-size, high-quality photographic reproduction of the work as it looked when it first came into the gallery’s Conservation Research Centre.
Spot the differences. The old version has a sludge-yellow-brown cast and its details have succumbed to age, grime and the efforts of previous conservators. Now, consider the freshly restored painting. You can clearly see the expressions on peoples’ faces and the symbols on their flags. Everything is bluer, redder, brighter.
“They were popular,” says Silvester, and her use of the plural is deliberate.
Start this story with a little art history. Pieter Brueghel the Younger is the son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder who is a popular, but not very prolific, late 16th-century artist. He died young and his two boys, aged just 4 and 3, would go on to be trained by their artist mother and their grandmother, a well-known miniaturist.
It’s clear, says Silvester, that Brueghel the Younger had access to his father’s studio equipment and cartoons (not the often-comedic material we refer to today, but full-scale preparatory drawings used as references for oil painting, tapestries and frescoes).
“He was able to replicate his work and that’s what he made his business on. It sounds like he took it upon his shoulders to keep the family tradition going. And they were very popular and they sold really well and he ended up with a huge studio and produced a lot of work.”
A Village Fair is not, however, a son’s homage to his father. Silvester says the painting is a copy of a work from another artist in that circle, Pieter Balten. There’s an example of the source painting in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, “very similar but reversed - Brueghel probably had an engraving” and 26 copies of it around the world. Six, including the one owned by Auckland Art Gallery, are believed to have been created in Brueghel the Younger’s workshop.
Silvester says Brueghel’s depictions of village life stood out at a time when art was “all about the Italianate” - classical ruins, golden landscapes and voluptuous women. The peasant scenes that emerged from Brueghel’s workshop were a complete contrast.
“They were hung in dining rooms as conversation starters. People really enjoyed these scenes of this rural life that was quite bawdy and a bit rude. Things that the merchant class couldn’t possibly be involved in, but wanted to see and talk about.”
How much is it worth? The original purchase price was £3500. The gallery doesn’t release current valuations, but the recent rediscovery of a similar-sized work in extremely good condition (titled The Village Lawyer) in France, made the news with a pre-auction estimate of more than NZ$1 million.
The full name of the Auckland gallery’s painting is A Village Fair (Village Festival in honour of Saint Hubert and Saint Anthony). It’s described on the gallery’s website as a scene of “mass revelry” - a religious festival playing second fiddle to an absurd play by a group of travelling actors. People sing and dance, drink and eat, crowding into high windows and swigging from flagons.
“There’s so much life,” says Silvester.
In the conservation treatment room, she’s outlining her multistage approach to dealing with all this detail. I think I’m paying attention (something about the wooden panels, something about correspondence with other galleries and museums) when, suddenly, a section of the painting collides with my train of thought and I blurt: “I’ve just seen a naked bottom!”
“Yeah,” Silvester grins. “That’s new.”
The thing about very old paintings is that you can’t help but wonder what other walls they have graced. Who else has stood and stared? What moments and conversations have they backdropped?
“It’s true that we become part of the history of an object,” says Silvester. “But you’re just one small part of it. It will continue to have a life for much longer. That’s one of the things I really like about being a conservator. The whole point of us is to have objects that continue life well beyond us.”
Last October, as Silvester was coming to the end of the Brueghel retouching, she went to see a doctor about a lump on her neck. She doesn’t want to talk specifics. She is, she agrees, usually a calm and methodical person. But that first week after a cancer diagnosis?
“That was different, because it was quite a shock. You just don’t expect it. There were some dark days in that first week.”
She did a Google search, saw some scary numbers and “just never googled anything about it ever again”.
Surgery. Radiation. Expensive immunotherapy treatment for the rest of this year. Silvester is 38 years old. She is married to Dan and they have two boys, Rafe, 10, and Ned, 7. On the Givealittle page that fundraised $50,000 towards her cancer treatment, Silvester wrote: “This diagnosis came out of the blue and absolutely floored me. It can be a really lonely place to be, but seeing all your loving messages for us all has been a lifting experience. Like the crowd along the sideline, the journey seems less dark and feet less heavy.”
Silvester is a runner. The weekend before this interview was gruellingly humid, but she completed 10km anyway. She got so sweaty, she says, her fingers wrinkled.
“When I’m out there and pushing a little bit, I can draw on a little bit of the anger. It’s a little bit like running through it and it kind of gives me energy and I think, ‘Well, that’s fine.’”
She took time off the Brueghel for surgery but says, “It was nice to come back into work and it be a place of normality. You have the diagnosis, you’re away for a little bit and then you come back and, ‘Oh yeah - that’s right. Normal life.’”
Silvester was born and raised in Dunedin. She describes her career as “something of an accident”. The right place, right time tale of a student finishing a double arts and consumer and applied science degree when she is offered a pre-training internship with a Dunedin Public Art Gallery staffer who is on her way home to Germany.
“That opportunity swept me up and off I went to Europe and trained with her for a year ... "
Ultimately, Silvester would complete a post-grad diploma at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and go on to work at the Tate, and in the Netherlands. Conservators, she says, come from all walks of life. Some are trained artists, others have strong science backgrounds.
“But you find your niche. And this, probably, is mine. This is where I can really find my happy place ... I can follow, but being creative is a challenge. Doing something unique and original - that’s completely opposite to what I’m doing here, which is confined in a lot of ways.
“I like this work. I find meaning in it. It’s somebody else’s production and I’m just trying to take it back to what I believe was their intent.”
She suspected she might find a bare bottom. And, for that matter, the hen that is the object of a rooster’s attention. Research into overseas examples of A Village Fair indicated what might be missing from the Auckland version.
She discovered, for example, that a urinating man appeared in every other version except Auckland’s.
“Same, same, same, same and then our one - pants on. And every single other one had the hen. So you start to go, ‘well why doesn’t ours? Oh, I see ... '
“The bottom’s more interesting, because it’s not in every one, but it is in the one in Brussels, and it’s a little bit exposed in the St Petersburg version ... I just had an inkling we would find that. There was just something about the painting surface. It didn’t look quite right.”
How badly did she just want to jump straight into the interesting bits?
“We have to hold back, unfortunately. But a bit of suspense makes the job very exciting.”
It takes a village to restore a village. When it comes to cleaning down a 400-year-old painting, you don’t just pick up a cloth and start wiping down the surface.
Gretel Boswijk from Auckland University’s SENV Tree-Ring Laboratory, for example, conducted the dendro-archaeological research that traced one of the painting’s wooden panels back to a forest in Lithuania that began growing in the 1300s. Auckland Museum’s expertise in X-ray fluorescence analysis revealed the elemental composition of the colour pigments used in Brueghel’s paints and Sam Ford, an external conservator, created the cradle that held the painting while Silvester worked on it.
Meanwhile, Auckland University’s Catherine Hobbis came on board for the SEM/EDX work or, in (almost) layperson language, the process of scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy of cross-sections of paint to allow further pigment identification; the university’s Photon Factory also assisted with an attempt to enhance one of Silvester’s most significant discoveries.
The age, composition and treatment of the painting’s wooden panels were a definitive factor in determining that A Village Fair was an original Brueghel the Younger. But then, on March 29, 2021: “Ta da! I found a new signature!”
The painting had always had a signature, says Silvester, it was dodgy (and misspelt). She’s left it there for posterity, but draws my attention to a corner section of the cleaned and restored work.
“Can you see what looks like a B, a V, a G, an H? I sent it to [international Brueghel expert] Christina Currie and she said, ‘Actually that does look pretty convincing.’ It was nice to have expert validation - to an extent. She’s not going to say it’s 100 per cent but she was like, ‘It’s promising.’”
Brueghel the Younger came into the world in 1564, the same year William Shakespeare was born and Michelangelo died. What looks like the remnant of a date, next to the newly recovered signature, suggests he painted Auckland Art Gallery’s Village Fair in the 1610s, which would make it one of the earliest known versions.
“As part of the cleaning process, we took off a lot of overpaint. That revealed a lot of damage. So there was a lot missing from the work, but also there were things that had been overpainted that were not damaged. They were just rude ... Obviously, when the last restoration was done, someone took some liberties and decided those bits shouldn’t be there.”
Silvester suspects Victorian prudishness. Either way, she’s not impressed with her predecessor(s) who, she says, abraded large areas of paint, especially in the sky section of the painting. Worse, someone had left something sitting on the artwork’s surface, creating what looks like a coffee cup stain - twice.
“We don’t like to disparage former restorers. It’s not what we’re about, and things change over that. But that one particular incident … and not just once!”
In an ideal world, Silvester says she would have removed the yellow-brown varnish layer before tackling the overpainting, but the solubility of the two was too similar. She dealt to them simultaneously, working centimetres at a time, rolling a solvent-dipped handmade swab (tiny tufts of cotton wool wound around a wooden kebab stick) back and forth over the work surface.
And then?
“Everywhere there is loss, I will retouch.”
That process took the best part of a year. Silvester worked one dot of paint at a time, using a 00-sized brush, with bristles so fine you can barely see them. Gamblin oil colours (pre-ground and bound in resin) were available to match most of Brueghel’s palette, but she had to hand-grind a lump of raw azurite to create the correct sky blue.
Brueghel is, she says, “quite forgiving” to copy. She also suspects there may have been extra hands at work in the making of the original.
“There are definitely two types of faces that are quite distinct, particularly in the way their eyes are painted. Some are quite rounded, like little owl eyes. Others are very linear, with smile lines.
“On a good day - or a bad day, some people might say - you can do a full day’s retouching. That depends on there being no other meetings or jobs. Or you can sit down and you just can’t get the colour right and today’s not my day.”
It’s meditative work, she says, best enjoyed with a podcast in the background to keep her mind focused on something.
“It can be hard with your arm raised all day and physically your shoulders get tired, but it’s not physical work.”
Some days, she covered up half the painting because there was just so much damage to contemplate. Individual bricks had been lost and vines needed to be restored. A huge patch of sky was abraded. Once, she literally gave a dog a bone (it had, previously, been reduced to a black, lumpy shadow).
And, over the many months, she made friends with the painting.
“I don’t talk to it, but we’re good friends!”
Silvester says A Village Fair is scheduled to go back on the public gallery’s walls in October. When we spoke, back in February, it was awaiting a final varnish and a new frame, more in keeping with its origins, was being researched. The pre-restoration replica will stay in the museum’s collection so that people can see how far it’s come.
“There are still elements of it that are showing its age. It doesn’t look brand new. That’s never our job, to make it look like it’s just come out of the artist’s studio. You’ve got to acknowledge that it’s 400 years old.
“I hope the work I’ve done has improved it. That it will go back on the wall and stay there for 100 years at least.”
And yes, she says, she does have a favourite bit.
“There’s this little girl, who I have not done anything with. She’s just always been the same. I’m not sure why she’s frustrated with her porridge, but she obviously is. I don’t know if she’s lost her parents, or they’re up dancing around. There’s lots of interactions between people, but I really like her little solitary figure. She’s just there.”
RESTORATION TIMELINE
2020
Nov: Painting enters Auckland Art Gallery conservation labs for examination
2021
Jan: “Before” photographs taken
Feb: Covid lockdown allows comprehensive research into Brueghel materials and techniques
March: New signature discovered; Dendrochronology (research into painting’s wooden components) begins
April: XRF (X-ray fluorescence) analysis of pigment composition of pigment
May: Cradle created to support work during treatment
June: Painting X-rayed
June: Varnish removal begins
July: Portable Near Infra-red attempt to see clearer image of signature.
August: Covid lockdown; Mock-ups created
Sep-Nov: Nun’s bottom and hen revealed from beneath old overpaint
Nov: Arrival of reference images from versions held in Fitzwilliam Museum, UK; Schloss Eggenberg, Austria and The Hermitage, St Petersburg
Dec: Varnish removal complete
2022
Jan: Retouching begins
Aug: New frame discussions begin
Oct: Dendrochronology research completed
2023
Feb: Final varnish signals end of retouching process
Let’s take a look at the science.