Relief for Dickens museum as experts say portrait of writer's wife is genuine

Tests show that painting by Irish artist Daniel Maclise is almost entirely hidden under later overpainting

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/02/charles-catherine-dickens-museum-experts-portrait-daniel-maclise

X-ray and UV analysis has revealed the painting is genuine but almost hidden under disastrous layers of later overpainting.

The good news for the Charles Dickens museum in London is that it does own an original portrait of the writer’s unfortunate wife, Catherine, by an important Victorian artist. The bad news is that it is almost entirely hidden under later overpainting.

Doubts about the authenticity of the portrait emerged in the past year. It was considered the better of only two paintings of Catherine in the collection, and believed to be the work of the Irish artist Daniel Maclise, a friend of the author’s.

Maclise was a highly regarded artist, and his prestigious commissions included two gigantic paintings of scenes from the Napoleonic wars in the House of Lords. In contrast the portrait of Catherine seemed crude to the museum’s curator Louisa Price, and worrying gaps in its provenance also emerged when a catalogue of all the museum’s paintings was being compiled this year.

Closer study revealed heavy overpainting across most of the surface, covering up to 70% of the original including most of the face. The painting is believed to be an attempt to mask the damage caused by an equally disastrous attempt to clean the picture, long before it came to the museum.

Price suspects that it happened during the period it spent in the United States, when it was also taken off its original stretcher and glued on to a sheet of plywood, a process which probably caused further damage.

The entire picture has been subjected to extensive tests at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, the conservation department of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The x-ray, and infrared scan, revealed that a genuine portrait by Maclise – recoded in a contemporary drawing – lies underneath. His original sketch in charcoal also showed up under the paint layer, along with details that vanished in the overpainting including a hair clip.

Cindy Sughrue, director of the museum, hopes to raise the money for full restoration of the painting. “This has been an interesting process to say the least, and one that has seen us swinging from despair to elation.”

They had married in 1836, and the museum is in the first house they rented together in London. However 10 children later, after he had fallen in love with the young actress Ellen Ternan, he moved out of their bedroom and had the connecting door boarded up, and then formally separated from her, announcing in a newspaper advertisement – to the horror of many of their friends – that “some domestic trouble of mine of longstanding” had been resolved. After he denounced her as an uncaring mother, her own sister and most of her children stayed with him.

The portrait shows Catherine in happier times wearing her engagement ring, and working on an embroidered decoration for a mantelpiece: it is exhibited in the museum near the real ring, and an almost identical piece of embroidery made by her.

The painting stayed with Catherine after they separated, and was given to their mutual friend, the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. It was then owned by a relative of hers, and spent a time in the United States after it was bought in 1946 in a bookshop in Hastings, before it was given to the museum in 1996.

“Anyone could see looking at it that it wasn’t quite right – one conservator commented that she looks more like a southern belle – but until we got the scans back it was hard to say exactly what had happened to it,” Price said. “It’s a great relief to know that most of the original painting is still there and we should be able to recover it.”