Abstract
Among the artists’ materials of the nineteenth century, pastel crayons merit scientific interest since their early commercial formulations are mostly unknown and, until now, have been considerably less studied with respect to other contemporary painting materials. In this framework, research herein reports the results of a comprehensive multi-analytical study of 44 pastel crayons of two recognized brands (LeFranc and Dr. F. Schoenfeld) from the Munch museum collection of original materials belonging to Edvard Munch. The integrated use of complementary spectroscopic and hyphenated mass-spectrometry techniques allowed the compositional profiles of the crayons to be traced providing the identification of the inorganic and organic pigments, the fillers/extenders and the binders. All crayons resulted to be oil- based and the binder was identified to be a mixture of a drying oil (safflower or linseed oil), palm oil or Japan wax and beeswax. Among others, pigments such as ultramarine, chrome yellows, Prussian blue, manganese violet, viridian and madder lake have been identified. A significant alignment in formulations of the brands was observed with the only exception of the greens which showed distinctive pigment and filler compositions. The analytical information provided for these commercial artists’ materials will be of great interest for academia, museum and other institutions hosting art collections dating from the same period and it will be used by the Munch museum to draw proper conservation strategies of its own artwork collections.
Highlights
Among the artists’ materials of the nineteenth century, pastel crayons merit scientific interest since their early commercial formulations are mostly unknown and, until now, have been considerably less studied with respect to other contemporary painting materials
Vast numbers of new appealing painting materials became available between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, and Munch explored their potentialities in his artworks, without neglecting the use of traditional materials
Analyses by X-ray Fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), Fourier-transform InfraRed (FT-IR) and Raman spectroscopies were carried out on micro samples from all the 44 selected pastel crayons allowing for the characterization/identification of the inorganic materials and providing complementary information to the molecular analysis of the binder and of the organic pigments
Summary
Among the artists’ materials of the nineteenth century, pastel crayons merit scientific interest since their early commercial formulations are mostly unknown and, until now, have been considerably less studied with respect to other contemporary painting materials In this framework, research reports the results of a comprehensive multi-analytical study of 44 pastel crayons of two recognized brands An important part of the Munch Museum (MUNCH) collection in Oslo comprises the original artists’ materials[1] used by Edvard Munch himself, of which around 300 items consist of pastel crayons of different brands This part of the collection has never received the attention it would deserve as an important source of nineteenth century artists materials. The terms pastel, crayon or pastel-crayon are seemingly interchangeable technical and historical literature from the seventeenth centuries provides only the slightest distinction that pastel
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