My first task of the day is to take some samples from a painting that is undergoing restoration, so I head off to the conservation department, down the corridor from our laboratory.
These are characteristic compounds that allow the precise identification of a resin or of a drying oil in a sample taken from a painting.
In others, figural references are more ambiguous, as in "Mantra I" and "Mantra II" (1991-92), two verticals with horizontal color divisions running down them, like samples from a paint chart.
One sample from a Peruvian wooden painting, (P-c containing calcite) was split into two aliquots and analysed at DCCI and GCI.
"A 'q' is a questioned sample from a crime scene a paint chip on someone's clothing from a hit and run, a hair in the hand of a murder victim.
"A 'q' is a questioned sample from a crime scene — a paint chip on someone's clothing from a hit and run, a hair in the hand of a murder victim.
While the present data cannot differentiate between a mixture of zinc white and barium sulfate or the pigment lithopone, XRD of another sample from a different van Bohemen painting from 1966 indicates the presence of lithopone, placing the pigment on the artist's pallet.
Figure 7 SEM EDX analysis performed on the grains of the T2 sample from complexion paint.
However, in a process tracked in a BBC2 Culture Show special to be shown tonight, the painting was cleaned and restored, removing centuries of grime and old varnish, dated from a paint sample and then studied by art experts including Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, an internationally acclaimed expert on Van Dyck, who confirmed it was the genuine article.
For the micro-samples from oil paints and paintings, spectra were obtained in transmission mode, 4000 650 cm−1, with a resolution of 4 cm−1 and 128 scans, using a Thermo diamond anvil compression cell.
