and for Sainte Cécile(transferred in 1803) (Emile-Mâle 1982b).^41 In 1798,
after arguments with François-Toussaint Hacquin, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre le
Brun, then commissaire-expertof the administration of the Musée Central
des Arts, set the rates for payment for “lifting from wood and transfer on
panel [as] 10 Frs per foot then 12 Frs per foot” (Emile-Mâle and Borelli
1957:410). Le Brun, a connoisseur with an excellent eye, seems to have
preferred wood to canvas.^42
Gruyer, curator of paintings at the Louvre, mentions on 8 June
1882, “eighty-nine pictures to be transposed onto new canvases or panels.”^43
The usual choice at the time seems to have been a new support made of
canvas, a material lighter than wood and “less sensitive to hygrometric
change, hence not causing any more cleavages.” Canvas was also not sus-
ceptible to attack by worms, and it provided flat support. The marouflage
used betweenthe paint layer and the new support was supposed to keep the
grain of the canvas from appearing (Emile-Mâle 1983b:227).
Transfer was widely practiced until 1938, and it continued more
sporadically until 1950. After transferring onto canvas several times, in
1950 Emile Rostain, in one of his last major transfers for the Louvre, used
a rigid support of marine-grade plywood with a cradle for Francia’s
Calvair e(Rostain 1981:113–15).Cradling
The cradle has been known in France since 1740, at about the time that
the Widow Godefroid, a professional reliner who did not make the cradles
herself, ordered one from a cabinetmaker. However, she prepared the back
of the painting and placed the cradle herself (Emile-Mâle 1983a:871). In
1755 a number of prestigious artists (Restout, Louis de Silvestre, Carle
Vanloo, Pierre, Boucher, Vien, Portail, Cochin) signed a document indicat-
ing that Rubens’s portrait Marguerite de Valoishad to be straightened out
and the splits repaired with a cradle.^44
In 1788 François-Toussaint Hacquin was said to have cradled the
damaged Saint Pierre dans sa prison,painted by Steenwyck (Louvre).^45 In
1798 he was put in charge of cradling Titian’s Le Couronnement d’épines,
which was split in three parts. Between December 1800 and February 1801,
Hacquin “joined the [disjointed] boards and applied a cradle of silver fir,
which the joiner had prepared for him.”^46 The archives provide proofofa
closer collaboration between the restorers of the support and the joiners
than we have imagined to this day. In 1796–97, the joinery enterprise of the
Louvre “employed six persons for rough-hewing and raplainssageof a paint-
ing.”^47 Similarly, in August 1798, on Rubens’s triptych La Pêche miraculeuse,
François-Toussaint Hacquin “joined the boards and directed the work nec-
essary to apply a woodwork cradle to it” (Emile-Mâle 1994).
Were these early cradles badly devised? Apparently the one that
Widow Godefroid placed on the back side of Rubens’s La Kermesse(more
than thirty years before Jean-Louis Hacquin was assigned to the work in
1770) had added to the damage. It must have been fixed, since the new
cradle, devised by Hacquin, is “a new type that plays and anticipates uneven-
nessofthe wood during the change of seasons.”^48 The sliding cradle is a
great French discovery of the eighteenth century; the cross-grain crossbars,
which ensure the real security of the panel, are mobile and slide in fixed
slats, which are glued in the direction of the grain of the support (Fig. 1).W P S: T H Y H F 269