sketches, was on wood panel. He seems to have liked the smooth surfaces
of panels prepared with white grounds. Only once in surviving documents
dowe read of this preference; in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton in 1618, he
wrote, “It is done on panel because small things are more successful on
wood.” In fact, the appeal of panel painting was so great for Rubens that
he was quite undeterred by the considerable difficulties of constructing
and painting on large panels. Rubens’s remark anticipates the only other
quote I have been able to find to explain a painter’s preference for wood
over canvas. Philippe de la Hyre, son of the more famous Laurent, said in
a lecture in 1709, “Wood prepared for working is much smoother than
canvases; that is why it is greatly to be preferred for smaller works which
require great refinement.”
Panel painting continued, of course, through the nineteenth
century. Wood was still the most convenient material for smaller works.
Countless oil sketches exist on little panels, of which the plein air paint-
ings of the Barbizon school and Seurat’s celebrated studies for the
Baignade and the Grande Jatteare obvious examples.
In the nineteenth century—no doubt inspired by the increasing
expertise of picture restorers in thinning and backing old panel paintings—
painters continued to experiment with wooden panels. For example, many
ofthe small genre pictures of Meissonier (a fascinating character who
wasManet’s commander in the Franco-Prussian War and also the sworn
enemy of Courbet) were assembled from small, thin strips of either
sycamore or oak, in arrangements reminiscent of Rubens’s panels. So thin
they are almost veneers, they are mounted on thin oak backboards. Is this
simple enlargement a curious technical idiosyncrasy of Meissonier? In the
case of the Halt at an Inn,now in the Wallace Collection, London, the evi-
dence provides a satisfying proofof enlargement: The panel consists of
nine members, the central part being sycamore; the rest of the members
are oak mounted on an oak veneer backing. The original composition,
comprising the center panel and the first four additions, was engraved by
Flameng and signed and dated 1862. Meissonier then enlarged the compo-
sition to its present size, probably in 1863. He signed it at both stages—
above the left-hand doorway in the central part, and at the bottom left on
the final addition. Valuable documentary evidence of various types has
elucidated the creation ofthis particular painting.
Once a panel painting left the artist’s studio, it began its precarious
existence in a world of unpredictability and danger. The misfortunes of
paintings in the last half millennium are well known; it is miraculous that
so many have survived. Wooden panel paintings are, of course, especially
vulnerable, since their main structural element exists in a condition of pre-
dictable instability that is under control if the surroundings are benign but
easily out of control should the surrounding environment change.
Wood is such a familiar material that it is easy to underestimate
its abilities to behave unexpectedly. The simple fact is that we still do not
fully understand the behavior of partially restrained, or even unrestrained,
centuries-old wooden panels. While we understand the general idea of
expansion and contraction in humid and dry conditions, the stresses and
strains of a composite structure can be very complex. We cannot predict
how a painted panel will behave if, for example, it is held for years in
steady conditions and then exposed to slowor rapid cycles of change.
What actually happens when a panel is moved from a dry climate, where it
has been for centuries, to an air-conditioned museum? What is the impact
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