92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



clean off the old one. Olive-oil does not dry properly, but it becomes 

 sticky after long exposure to the air, and nothing could be better cal- 

 culated to catch and retain dust. The wisdom of our ancestors made 

 them rejoice in coats of varnish applied thickly over dirty pictures, to 

 lock up the dirt between the paint and the varnish, and so preserve it for 

 the delight of posterity. Our ancestors liked dingy pictures, and the 

 dirtier they were the better they seem to have liked them. The Presi- 

 dent of the Irish Academy, in a witty speech that I regret not to have 

 kept, said that in Ireland at the present day the public taste required 

 that a picture should be very black, and that it should not cost more than 

 six pounds. Now, dirt is a great help to darkness of complexion, as 

 we all know by the faces of dirty boys in the streets, and, if darkness 

 were considered a merit in these boys, it would be a great mistake to 

 wash them. 



The question of picture-cleaning is one of the most complicated 

 that can be. Suppose you leave a very dirty picture as it is, do you 

 see, can you possibly see, what the artist painted ? Assuredly not ; 

 and why should decent people tolerate dirty pictures when they will 

 not tolerate a dirty table-cloth ? The answer is that, if the picture 

 could be cleaned as safely as the table-cloth it would be done without 

 hesitation, but that cleaning may possibly remove light glazes and 

 scumblings along with the varnish, and that if these glazes, the finish- 

 ing work of the artist, are once removed, no human being on earth, 

 except the artist who painted the picture, can replace them. But, by 

 the time a picture urgently wants cleaning, the painter has generally 

 been for many years in his grave. Therefore, in having a picture 

 cleaned you are risking that which can not be replaced. All this has 

 been said before, but the arguments for and against picture-cleaning 

 have usually been presented in a controversial manner by strong parti- 

 sans of one side or the other, and, as I am not at all a partisan in the 

 matter, I may be able to state the case more fairly. The choice of 

 evils is this : To escape from the certain evil of leaving a picture con- 

 cealed by the dirt upon it, you expose it to the possible evil of remov- 

 ing the finishing glazes. Anybody who has painted a picture knows 

 what a disaster that is. The degree of the disaster varies with differ- 

 ent artists, according to the importance of the glazes in their system 

 of work. To remove the glazes, even partially, from a Titian is to 

 destroy the picture, because he glazed a great deal, and what we all 

 know as the rich Titian color required that method for its production ; 

 but, when a painter has used a more direct method, painting the in- 

 tended color at once, or nearly so, then the removal of a glaze does 

 not destroy the character of the picture, though it may diminish its 

 beauty and charm. To remove a glaze, in any case, is to put the pict- 

 ure back from a finished to an unfinished state ; this is exactly what 

 is done, and the degree of destruction is in inverse ratio to the degree 

 of advancement attained in that unfinished state. But, if the picture 



