Recent studies of the Hexham Abbey painting collection

Kelsey, Thomas and Theodorakopoulos, Charis (2019) Recent studies of the Hexham Abbey painting collection. Hexham Historian, 29. pp. 23-34.

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Abstract

A recount of the latest work on the collection and the analysis of the medieval paintings of Hexham Abbey is provided. Medieval pigments of the panel paintings such as blue azurite pigment and post-1840 restoration substitute pigments such as French ultramarine were detected with visible light and ultraviolet fluorescence microscopy. A recently found painting in the Abbey's collection, was studied by means of multispectral imaging and was attributed to the 15th century 'Dance of Death' sequence of panels. After a virtual varnish removal on highly pigmented colour spots with the aid of non-negative least squares analysis resulting in quantitative heat-maps of the panel, the pigment concentration on the painting surface and enhanced reflectance image spectra were extracted. With the aid of these spectra the presence of original medieval pigments such as yellow ochre, verdigris, madder and Egyptian blue was indicated.

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