[Virgil Elliott]

Marvin, Michael,

According to a lot of testing done on paint chips that had become detached from many old paintings, the preponderance of Old Master paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries seem to have been painted without soft resins like damar or mastic, at least, as these resins are easily detected by the methods used, if they are there, and none were found. What was found in most cases was linseed oil or walnut oil, and pigment. The introduction of soft resins, wax, and various megilp concoctions to oil paintings appears not to have become widespread until the middle of the 18th century, and lasted until the mid-19th century, when the problems attributed to those ingredients began to show up often enough to suggest a cause-and-effect relationship between them. Unfortunately for posterity, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake published his book in 1847, and it has influenced many painters in modern times to adopt the practices that were current in the first half of the 19th century, which have since proved problematic. Jacques Maroger subsequently clouded the waters even more with his equally fallacious assumptions published in his 1948 book, which led more people to believe the Old Masters used these 18th century mediums, along with his contentions that one could not possibly paint like the Old Masters without using those mediums. They were barking up the wrong tree.

If resins were commonly used in Old Master paintings done in the 16th and 17th centuries, they have as yet gone undetected. There remains a theoretical possibility that hard resins cooked in oil might have escaped detection due to the molecular changes brought about by incorporating these resins with oil at high temperatures, and/or by changes wrought by great aging, but this would only leave the relatively minor portions where the oil was described as "heat-bodied" as possibilities where hard resins might be present. The use of heat-bodied oil seems to have been for certain special effects only, rather than general, with most of the samples tested showing uncooked oils only. Of course, science never rests, and now there are even better methods of detecting resins in old paint, so stay tuned, new information could come out at any time to cause us to rethink everything.

I hope that helps shed a little light on the subject.

Marvin, congratulations on your award at ASOPA. You certainly deserved a good award in that show. I enjoyed meeting you there.

Virgil