Paintings in the Laboratory: Scientific Examination for Art History and Conservation

This volume reflects and celebrates the life of Karin Groen (1941-2013) and her work in the scientific examination of paintings. It contains a selection of her ground breaking articles published in this field over the past decades, and will continue to be a source of inspiration for a new generation of scientists, restorer-conservators and art historians. She was particularly involved in the Rembrandt Research Project, systematically examining Rembrandt's paintings and the knowledge she gleaned of the composition and build-up of (quartz) ground layers provided useful additional information for the attribution of paintings to Rembrandt and his workshop. Her methods, in which paintings are examined in close collaboration between the scientist and the restorer-conservator, always focussed on the question 'How did the artist do it?'. This book includes studies not only on paintings by Rembrandt but also on those painted by Frans Hals, Judith Leyster and Johannes Vermeer as well as studies of changes in painter's materials, such as the pigments in Dutch still-life paintings, and in works by Lucas Van Leyden, Claude Lorrain and others.