Discovering van Gogh.

Due to main renovation works, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is temporarily hosted by the Hermitage Museum, where it will remain until 25 April 2013.

The Van Gogh Museum has been involved over the last 15 years in researches about the life and work of Vincent van Gogh, in particular, starting from 2005, in collaboration with Shell and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, a scientific research project is in course, entitled “Van Gogh's studio practice”. The aim is to deeply investigate the work of the artist and understand how his art was related to that of his contemporaries, extending the research also to artists with whom he came into contact like Mauve, Toulouse-Lautrec, Signac and Gauguin or of whose art he well acquainted the working like Monticelli, Delacroix and Millet.

The project should be ended within Spring 2013, that is in coincidence with the re-opening of the Museum.

Waiting for visiting the Museum again, let’s have a look to its website, in order to know the techniques that are being used for the on-going investigations and the results obtained up to now.

From the preliminary report concerning the employed methods, it seems that the observation of paintings through normal, raking and transmitted light is the first necessary approach for their knowledge. Soon after it comes UV fluorescence to detect the different varnish layers, then the infrared reflectography which allows to reveal the presence of preparatory drawings, like the guidelines for perspective seen in “Paris from Theo’s apartment in Rue Lepic”, X-radiography, that permitted to detect, turned of 90 degrees, a human figure, perhaps referable to “Sewing woman”, underneath the painting “Basket of potatoes”, and optical microscopy also with polarized light to study the shape of brushwork. Thanks to micro-samplings (fragments of paint not larger than a pin point or micrometric stratigraphic sections), it is also possible to carry out scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-rays spectroscopy (SEM-EDX) and transmitting electron microscopy (TEM) investigations. These provide the chemical analyses of painting and preparatory layers, such as that of “Banks of the Seine” in pure lead white and not mixed with cheaper fillers like in more commercial paintings. To prepare the samples for TEM, a highly sophisticated instrumentation was used: a nano-machining with the focused ion beam (FIB).

For the moment we can admire the paintings at the Hermitage, waiting for the Symposium that will take place in Amsterdam from 24 to 26 June 2013 and with which the period of the results communication will finally start.

To learn more:

*http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=13321&lang=en

*http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=80108&lang=en 

  and attached pdf (methods report)

To learn more “Archaeometrically speaking…”:

* J Dik, K Janssens, G Van Der Snickt, L van der Loeff, K Rickers, M Cotte, Visualization of a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh using Synchrotron Radiation based X-ray fluorescence elemental mapping, Analitical Chemistry 80, 16, (2008), 6436–6442.