Research into painting materials and techniques 2001 - present
During the five-year post academic course in painting conservation at the Limburg Conservation Institute in Maastricht (SRAL) Charlotte specialized in historic painting materials and techniques and the process of reconstructing historic paintings. She has made many historic reconstructions since. For a representative selection see below.
photo Van Gogh Museum
2019 Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Quite a number of the paints Van Gogh used, are known to be unstable. Over time this lead to colour change within his works. In Sunflowers (1889) for example, certain chrome yellow pigments discoloured and red lakes faded, thus unbalancing the original colour scheme. For the exhibition Van Gogh and the Sunflowers Charlotte reconstructed the painting's original appearance. To reproduce the original colours, she worked with pigments that are chemically similar to those used at the end of the 19th century, recreated by chemists in the REVIGO project.
photo North Carolina Museum of Art
2012 St. John Altarpiece, Francescuccio Ghissi, North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), Raleigh (NC), USA
More than one hundred years ago the St. John Altarpiece (1370-80) was dismantled and the nine scenes depicting the life of Saint John the Baptist and the Crucifixion, were sawn apart and sold as separate panels to art collectors. They left Italy and eight are now in the collections of four different museums in the United States. One went missing. Charlotte reconstructed the lost panel for an exhibition in which all panels were united in the original coherence. To approximate what could have been the original artwork, she combined information from various sources: Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea, technical data from the eight remaining 14th-century panels and Cennino Cennini's Libro dell' Arte.
Charlotte’s reconstruction was subsequently used by computer scientists from Duke University to develop new image processing tools.
photo Museum Prinsenhof
2010-11 Maurits, Prince of Orange, Michiel van Mierevelt, Museum Prinsenhof, Delft
In 2011 Museum Prinsenhof dedicated an exhibition to the work and studio practice of the 17th-century Dutch painter Michiel van Mierevelt. This artist worked very efficient and produced an enormous amount of portraits. Portraits of important figures (like prince Maurits) that sold well, were reproduced over and over again and it seems that a template was used to transfer the composition and facial features. Charlotte made a series of educational reconstructions for the exhibition illustrating the painter's working methods. She also recreated one of van Mierevelt's portrait paintings in the museum gallery during opening hours as part of the exhibition.
photo TATE
2007-8 The Rigi, Joseph Mallord William Turner, TATE, London, UK
Since the 1990s scientists at TATE Britain have been experimenting with anoxic framing: frames in which oxygen is replaced by other types of gas. With these new frames they hope to prevent or slow down degradation processes due to the presence of oxygen. Some pigments however (for instance Prussian blue) are known to lose their colour in the absence of oxygen. TATE Britain has many watercolour paintings by J.M.W. Turner in its collection with Prussian blue and other oxygen sensitive pigments. Charlotte made a series of reconstructions that chemically approached Turners' materials as accurate as possible. She sourced pigments from historic collections, studied 19th-century watercolour recipes and painting manuals and worked on paper that was reconstructed especially for this project.