Abstract
This project will reconstruct and contextualise coloured marquetry on late-17th- and 18th-century furniture from the North and South Netherlandish regions by chemically characterising their photodegraded monochromatic surfaces.
The study of the marquetry on an 18th-century South Netherlandish table from the collections of the KMKG-MRAH revealed that its polychromic splendour remained unnoticed due to the heavily faded colourants. Further study of the KMKG-MRAH collection revealed three additional pieces of visually monochromatic furniture that were likely coloured. Existing scholarship reveals that the tradition of 'painting on wood' in these regions remains unstudied, which in turn has resulted in misinterpretations of the furniture's original aesthetic, historical, and domestic significance.
The study starts with an art-technical analysis of 17th- and 18th-century art-technical sources for colouring wood, which will be parsed into a relational dataset linking recipes, materials, techniques, and surviving objects (cf. the current FED-tWIN HOME-AGE database).
Selected recipes will be experimentally reconstructed as mockups, and will undergo artificial UV-based ageing under stable climatological conditions. The mockups are then characterised at defined intervals using advanced imaging and spectroscopic methods (FTIR, XRD, macro-XRF) from the ARCHES and AXIS research groups. The data from the chemical characterisation obtained from both the mockups and the objects will be consolidated into a reference database designed to clarify the relationship between the reconstructions and the studied objects. Based on these relational insights, additional furniture from the Royal Museum of Art & History (Brussels), the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, and the Wallace Collection in London will be examined.
Through this methodology the project aims to digitally reconstruct the original polychrome colouring of faded marquetries and gain insights into their historical domestic context. The expected outcomes extend beyond an historical aesthetical reconstruction and the contextualisation: the project will generate fundamental knowledge that will serve future research project proposals, such as the development of safe cleaning and stabilisation methods for these surfaces without removing the remaining material of the faded colourants, which constitutes the only tangible evidence of a once colourful past.
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