It gave me an uneasy feeling of lack of ownership...
Well, of course, I do not own it, Mr. or Mrs Google owns it and I play with the words and pictures on this platform at other entities discretion.
I have for forwarded my research around the beautiful romantic landscape painting I had purchased earlier.
It is not signed so I have been tracing its possible via stylistic analysis.
So here is food for thought.
Definitely it is not a German style painting but Scottish and most likely depicting the region of Cumbria.
Look at those two paintings by Charlotte Nasmith.
She was a daughter of Alexander Nasmith.
Alexander Nasmyth (9 September 1758 – 10 April 1840) was a Scottish landscape painter, a pupil of Allan Ramsay. (...)
Nasmyth's six daughters all became notable artists. His daughters were Jane, Barbara, Margaret, Elizabeth, Anne and Charlotte.[11] His eldest son, Patrick Nasmyth, studied under his father, then went to London and attracted attention as a landscapist.[1] (Wikipedia)
Dropping of the German thread, I decided to try to identify the landscape on my painting, the particularly shaped mountain with two peaks and a cascading side and place it in a 18/early 19th century context.
Et voila, I immediately recognized the the hill, the lake painted just slightly at a different angle, the sail boats, that shimmering golden air of Romanticism and of the mastic varnish.
The warmth of this discovery was quite remarkable.
Yes, my initial attempt at cleaning the surface was a serious mistake.
However, the waxy for i extracted pointed to the varnish being mastic.
It is also the clue that the landscape was painted before ca 1830 since more prevalent later Damar varnish was not in use earlier. I have also found that while Damar varnish used to contributing to more distinctive yellowing of the paint surface, Mastic did rather darken it.
So armed with this assumption I have successfully neutralized most of the wax and coated the rest of the canvas with Mastic. Mastic does not harden as much as Damar, it gave a gorgeous sheen.
This beautifully smelling mixture of natural resin (the Tears of Chios) and turpentine has brought the painting to a spectacular light.
I will surely one day travel to Scotland and devote more research to the subject.
As a younger person I did not quite understand the development of the Romantic style.
But now I am beginning to understand, particularly after reading Goncourt's French Eighteenth Century Painters) (1859–1875) comments on the artistry of Watteau.
The "back to the Nature" was the first underlying prompt, away from the stifle air of the cities, away from stiff and formal clothing. The air of Liberty was surely filling the sails.
