and Humanity(Glasgow Art Gallery and Museums), painted on a mahogany
panel measuring 127 3 197 cm, had originally been heavily battened and
subsequently developed splits.
Anotable exception is the series of large oak and mahogany pan-
els used by George Stubbs in the 1770s and 1780s, when he was seeking a
stable support for his experiments with media such as wax and animal
fat. In a memoir of Stubbs’s life given by his common-law wife to Ozias
Humphry, Mary Spencer described Stubbs as taking conservation mea-
sures with his work; she recalled Stubbs as having a large portrait of
George III lined before it was exhibited. The series ofThe Haymakers and
The Reapers at Upton House in Warwickshire (National Trust), painted in
1783, have cradles attached to them. It is possible that Stubbs had the
panels cradled as a preventive measure to make the wooden supports as
dimensionally stable as the large ceramic plaques he had made for him
by Josiah Wedgwood.
From this brief overview it is clear that apart from sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century portraits, most panel paintings that have been treated
since the seventeenth century were brought to Britain, principally from
Italy, France, Holland, and Spain. Many were bought by agents, such as
Nicolas Lanier, who negotiated for the Mantua collection for Charles I
in1626, or those whom Sir Charles Eastlake employed to find paintings in
Italy for the National Gallery in London after his appointment as its first
director in 1855. Many works of more variable quality were purchased as
part of the grand tour, and, depending on the taste of the collector and of
the period, particular schools would be fav ored. The cabinet at Felbrigg,
for example, was remodeled by William Windham II in 1751 to house his
collection of paintings purchased while on his grand tour in Italy a decade
earlier, and to demonstrate his taste for Rococo Italian landscape (Jackson-
Stops 1983:19–20). The Spanish collection at Kingston Lacy was put
together by William Bankes from about 1814, when the disruption of
the Peninsular War made the purchase of many fine paintings possible
(Cornforth 1986[3]:1576–80). The collection has a panel of a Madonna and
Child with Angels,attributed to Francisco Ribalta (Figs. 4, 5). The panel is in
an untouched condition and has the original loose fiber s glued over joints,
as well as dovetailed battens that are set in, top and bottom, at right angles
to the grain. Little work was carried out on the Bankes collection until it
was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1984, and so this panel was never
subjected to cradling and thinning.
The value of the archival material referring to the conservation of
the Royal Collection was first recognized by Oliver Millar in his book The
Queen’s Pictures,which contains many references to reports, estimates, and
accounts. There were two periods of particular activity in the conserva-
tion of panel paintings in the period covered by this article: the reign of
Charles I and the period from 1857 to 1879, during Queen Victoria’s
reign, when the post of surveyor of Crown pictures was held by Richard
Redgrave. Other periods during which the collection received particular
royal attention have fewer references to panel conservation. The interest of
Fr ederick, Prince ofWales, in augmenting and rearranging the collections,
occasioned a report of a memorable visit to a restorer in 1732: “On
Saturday in the evening her Majesty, the Prince of Wales, The duke and
the five Princesses went in Coaches from Kensington to Chelsea Hospital,
where after taking a turn in the Great Hall, they walked to the Water-side240 McClure