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X-ray of the Pierrot painting
| We've all read about using x-rays to peer beneath the surface of a painting. What fabulous treasures might be found under that dirty old painting we see in the attic, flea market, or antique mall? This is what I wondered as I stared at Sonoma County Hospital. Eugene Pierrot was not a wealthy man. Had he re-used an old canvas for this painting? What might lie underneath? Would x-rays tell me more about how the painting was made, maybe help me understand why Pierrot painted it? (Remember, the newspaper article describing the painting as a 'thank-you' gift had not yet been located.) It might also be important for the conservator to know what was on the canvas before beginning his work. I also knew that Pierrot was not a professionally-trained artist. His work might be full of touch-ups and errors. |
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I had no idea how to x-ray a photograph, but I remembered that my dentist, Dr. Wayne Sutton of Rohnert Park, had a neat new digital tool for dental x-rays. I prevailed upon him to give me a few minutes of his time. Since the dental system has a very small (one inch) sensor, we couldn't look at very much of the painting but I was mostly interested in the intensity required to properly image the painting. Dr. Sutton and I discovered that the "standard" exposure for teeth was way too much for the painting -- our test turned out solid black. We gradually dialed back the exposure time until we were shooting at 0.1 second instead of the standard 0.6 second. The image of the head of Dr. Shearer sitting in his buggy showed that our technique worked. |
| Next, I contacted Sutter Medical Center in Santa Rosa, where the painting had been found in 2004, and was referred to James Wille, Director of Diagnostic Imaging. He agreed to allow me to come in on a weekend, providing patient loads were light, and work with his x-ray technicians. This was a great opportunity. I showed them the results from Dr. Sutton's tests and we tried some exposures. The medical x-ray system could image almost all of the painting at once. To be safe, we overlapped and took four separate exposures. The Sutter x-ray system was also digital and very quick. After only an hour or two I was ready to go, with a set of films and a CD-ROM of digital images. |
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Regretfully, the x-ray images did not show a lost Rembrandt, but they did show that Pierrot had worked over his creation to try to make it come out right. The artist painted the original images in a rather radio-opaque, perhaps lead-based paint. The touch-ups were done in another paint base and do not show up in the x-ray image. The image of Dr. Shearer in his buggy is essentially the same in both views, suggesting that he was there in the original design and was not painted in after the fact. Most of the people in the picture, except for Dr. Shearer, have been decreased in size and moved farther away.
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| This was an additional clue that the emphasis was Dr. Shearer, not the hospital. Also notice that in the x-ray Dr. Shearer's buggy has only two wheels. The other wheels were painted with a different kind of paint, transparent to x-rays. |
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What other differences can you see? [The white splotches in the x-ray images are paint blobs on a loose canvas lining that the artist applied to the stretcher bars, under the hospital painting]. |
In conclusion, while the x-rays showed that there was no underlying artwork, it was equally obvious that the painter had reworked his composition, perhaps in an attempt to correct his original errors of perspective. He also changed some of the details in an attempt to make Dr. Shearer stand out from the background. My initial hypothesis, that Dr. Shearer commissioned the painting, later turned out to be incorrect. However, the idea that Dr. Shearer was the subject and not the hospital was right.
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I want to thank both Dr. Wayne Sutton and James Wille and the Diagnostic Imaging staff of Sutter Medical Center for their support of my research. To Terence E. Cline, my brother-in-law, go my thanks for educating me in the mistakes that self-trained artists make.
Jeremy Nichols |
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