The department painting-conservation of the Museum für Hamburgische
Geschichte is in search of a special painting technique which we
describe below. If you have ever seen a similar technique used in the
18th century or before we like you to contact:

Silke Beiner-Büth, Painting Conservator,
http//www.HamburgMuseum.de
Mailto: [log in to unmask]

For exhibition purposes we recently have conserved/restored two
portraits of Johann Ernst Heinsius, a portrait painter from
Weimar/Germany who worked from 1780-1784 in Hamburg. Working with these
portraits and examinating 3 further portraits of Heinsius, we discovered
an extraordinary painting technique, which we have never seen before on
comparable paintings:

Heinsius used to spread very rough lead white pieces (thickness 1-2 mm)
on top of his red ground-layer (priming coat) before he started to use
his oil-colors. The lead white can’t be seen as a white color, but only
as a rough surface. We guess he wanted to get by this a special kind of
light reflection with the optical effect of a smooth transition from one
color to the next, the colors should merge into each other.

Our aim is to come to know what gives Heinsius the idea for this
technique and if he follows someones example. To solve this problem we
looked to the literature of painting techniques and found a hint
concerning baroque painters - especially Caravaggio was mentioned as a
painter who used sandy, rough and unpolished ground-layers (Rotondi,
Pasquale /Urbani, Giovanni: Il restauro delle tele del Caravaggio in San
Luigi dei Francesi a Roma. in: Boll. ICR 1966, p. 11-20) but - we are
disappointed - couldn’t find informations about a painter who used lead
white.

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