Saint John and the Lamb (1854), Frederick Bacon

SUMMARY
Treatment of a deteriorated engraving with chine collé. An intaglio print on card-like or laminated paper(s), after Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s painting “The Infant Saint John with the Lamb” (1660-1665), currently held by the National Gallery. The image depicts a child standing in a rocky, wild landscape, wearing a fur garment and embracing a young sheep which stands on a nearly outcropping and lays one foreleg over the child’s front arm. At the feet of the young Saint John, a cross is wrapped with a bandolier that reads “ECCE AGNUS DEI” or “Behold the lamb of God”, as John the Baptist was to have exclaimed upon seeing Jesus Christ. The image area is 47.5 cm tall and 32 cm wide. The piece is titled and printed with the publisher’s information in the margin below the image.

The substrate is flexible and stable, with a significant loss in the lower margin (9.5 cm x 4.5 cm) which appears to have been eaten away by a small animal such as a mouse (tooth marks are visible near the edges of the loss under the microscope).

Old, discolored and crusty adhesive residue is present on the surface in the top two and lower left corners of the recto. This is likely from a previous matting.

The surface of the recto and verso shows significant foxing throughout. Additionally, there is a horizontal bar of darkened discoloration 22.5 cm from the bottom. There is also preferential darkening generally on the verso beneath where the image appears. A brown, tidelined stain appears along the bottom edge on both recto and verso, likely from a liquid that soaked through the paper from below.

TREATMENT
The print was dry cleaned recto and verso with crumbs of Mars plastic eraser and soft brushes, avoiding the image area. It was then humidified and twice blotter-washed with pH-adjusted deionized water (pH 8) and dried between felts, under pressure. During the washing, the adhesive accretions at the corners of the recto were gently mechanically removed. The washing resulted in a lightening in the paper overall, but the foxing was still present, and in some areas foxing previously only visible on the verso became visible on the recto.

To reduce the foxing and staining, a bleaching treatment was undertaken. The piece was spot bleached recto and verso with a 0.1% aqueous solution of sodium borohydride applied locally with a small, round brush. This resulted in a reduction of the foxing, which was then further reduced by blotter washing the piece recto and verso with the same bleaching solution. The print was then light bleached for 30 minutes with exposure to the recto only and dried again under pressure.

The loss to the bottom edge was filled with a cut piece of slightly less thick paper tinted with a light wash of acrylic paint to match the tone of the print, and attached from the verso with Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste. The fill was faced with a thin layer of paper pulp adhered with wheatstarch paste on the recto. Finally, the fill was trimmed to match the edge of the print, and a combination of watercolor pencil and micro pen were used to mark in the area of loss within the printed image.