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Cornell synchrotron unveils long-hidden Wyeth painting
Stubborn layers of paint had kept them hidden for several decades, but the bluish, purplish and reddish hues of a 1919 painting by 20th-century artist N.C. Wyeth have finally come to light, thanks to cutting-edge technologies developed at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS).
The careful visualization of a Wyeth magazine illustration depicting two men engaged in a brawl, only known previously in black and white, was publicly unveiled Aug. 19 at an American Chemical Society symposium by chemist and art conservation expert Jennifer L. Mass, M.S. '92, Ph.D. '95.
Mass, who collaborated on the Wyeth project with CHESS senior research associate Arthur Woll and art conservators Christina Bisulca, Noelle Ocon and Matt Cushman, described the powerful X-ray technology used to unveil the old painting, which Wyeth had painted over in about 1923 with his work "Family Portrait."
CHESS scientists, led by Woll, developed a technique called confocal X-ray fluorescence that harnesses the brilliant X-rays from the National Science Foundation-supported CHESS to deal specifically with the problem of painted-over paintings. They teamed with Mass, senior scientist at Delaware's Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, to study "Family Portrait" after it was discovered 12 years ago that a second work, the scene of a dramatic struggle from a 1919 Everybody's Magazine article titled "The Mildest Mannered Man," lay underneath it.
Their device focuses an X-ray beam onto a painting and collects the fluorescent X-rays given off by the chemicals in the various layers of paint. Each color of paint produces a unique fluorescence spectrum, like a chemical fingerprint, which can then be mapped to reconstruct the original color schemes in the hidden painting.
Confocal X-ray microscopy isn't new; it had been tried in Europe several years ago, but mostly on scientific specimens, said Sol Gruner, CHESS director and professor of physics.
"We built a setup specifically to look at large works of art," Gruner said. more
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