BBC's Repair Shop Conserves Henrietta Maria (?)
July 22 2021
Picture: BBC
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The BBC's popular tv show The Repair Shop continues to delve into the world of restoring Old Master Paintings.
This week's episode, available on IPlayer, saw the transformation of a portrait of Charles I's Queen Henrietta Maria in mourning. The removal of overpaint and the conservation process in general revealed that many of the features of mourning were later additions, a practise often done with portraits of historic figures.
Overall, the quality of the portrait looks rather handsome. At a glance, it seems to have been executed by a capable hand, from what I can tell from my small screen anyway. Furthermore, the work seems to be loosely based on a Van Dyck prototype (a painting last recorded in the collection of the Earls of Radnor), although the differences between the two would encourage me question the identity perhaps.
Update - Bendor, whose opinion on these things is of much greater value, has written in with the suggestion that it might be a much later seventeenth or early eighteenth-century work based on the aforementioned Van Dyck.
