Bajaboy
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Registered: 10-9-2003
Location: Bahia Asuncion, BCS, Mexico
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Mission painting getting face-lift
Our good friend and neighbor is doing this work. Hope you enjoy.
zac
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/mar/03/1m3painti...
Mission painting getting face-lift
18th-century oil was painted locally for Spanish outposts
By Lola Sherman (Contact) Union-Tribune Staff Writer
2:00 a.m. March 3, 2009
Alexis Miller used a swab drenched in solvent to remove wax and paper used on the front of the José Joaquín Esquibel painting of “The Last Judgment”
to stabilize it so work could be done on the back. The Balboa Art Conservation Center is restoring the painting. (John Gibbins / Union-Tribune) -
BALBOA PARK — One of the largest paintings ever created for the Spanish outposts in California, which has hung in both Mission San Diego de Alcalá and
Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside, is being restored before it goes on a binational tour.
“The Last Judgment,” the artwork by José Joaquín Esquibel probably dates to the late 18th century.
The oil painting on canvas, 8 feet by 10 feet, covers the entire wall between two windows at the Balboa Art Conservation Center. Restoration artists
are working meticulously to bring back its grandeur.
It's the largest piece ever worked on there, said Betsy Court, chief conservator of paintings at the center in Balboa Park.
The painting shows Christ on a globe gesturing to hundreds of people on Judgment Day. Those on his right ascend to heaven. Hell awaits those on his
left.
The muted reds and blues with some yellow and much brownaccentuate the grimness of Hades, Court said.
“It's looking a little darker than it would have originally because of the grime over time,” she said. Varnish used in a 1967 restoration also
negatively affected the color, she said.
A new varnish is expected to brighten the painting.
The restoration is being financed by a $107,000 grant from the Getty Foundation of Los Angeles and $28,000 from the California Missions Foundation,
matched by the Mission San Luis Rey Restoration Fund, for a total of $163,000.
“It's a two-year grant,” Court said, “but it may actually take longer” and require more funding.
Until May, the painting hung in Mission San Luis Rey, where it will return in 2011 after a tour in Mexico and the United States.
The work originally hung in Mission San Diego, the first in a string of 21 California missions founded by Franciscan priests to spread the Catholic
faith.
The painting was inventoried there in 1834 after the secularization of the missions. At the time, California was still part of Mexico.
Its history after that is a mystery that historians are attempting to solve.
Art historian Pamela J. Huckins, who has written about the painting for her dissertation with New York University, believes the painting is the same
as one photographed in 1889 in the Old Town adobe chapel, known as Ramona's wedding place from the Helen Hunt Jackson novel. The photograph can be
seen in the University of Southern California digital archives, where it is referred to as a tapestry.
But no one knows for sure where the painting spent the 100-plus years between 1834 at Mission San Diego and the mid-1940s when it was known to be in
Oceanside.
Was it in the chapel? University of San Diego historians have suggested other possible locations.
Esquibel, the artist, is known to have worked in Mexico City between 1781 and 1797, Huckins said. His name on the painting had been covered by the
frame until recently.
“Although badly in need of restoration,” Huckins wrote of the piece, “it remains one of the most complex and well-executed paintings in all the
California Missions.”
The composition of the painting, she wrote, is based on a Flemish print from a French masterpiece, which derives much from Michelangelo.
Her essay, titled "Antiquity and the Renaissance in Oceanside: The European Legacy of the Last Judgment at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia," was
written for the annals of The Institute of Aesthetic Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in fall 2007.
She ran into the work, Huckins said, while doing research for her dissertation on art and decoration in California missions.
The two-century-old canvas is fragile, Court said, so the restoration is painstaking. In places where the canvas contained folds, artists worked under
a microscope using a scalpel to remove gobs of paint from the 1967 restoration, she said.
Court said the conservation team had to painstakingly remove 400 patches that had been added at that time.
Where there are tears, the team must try to match the original paint as delicately as possible, working with tiny brushes. Paint from the previous
restoration was “tough” and thick and difficult to remove, Court said.
“We are getting it to the point where it will be stable enough to travel” to the start of an exhibition in Mexico City, Court said.
The exhibition, due to open this spring, is called “The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain (1600-1821).” Mexico was called New Spain by its
Spanish conquerors until the success of the Mexican War of Independence.
The tour begins in Mexico City and goes to San Antonio, Texas; Monterrey, Mexico; Tijuana; Oakland; and the Autry National Center of the American West
in Los Angeles.
Continuing restoration work may limit “The Last Judgment” to the exhibits in Mexico City, Oakland and Los Angeles, said Bradford Claybourn, museum
curator at Mission San Luis Rey.
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David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 65296
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
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Mood: Have Baja Fever
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Thanks Zac... San Luis Rey Mission is almost next door to me... should have a new look at it!
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