A masterpiece on a on a pin head

Finden Ltd’s work with microfocus X-ray beams at Diamond Light Source recently appeared in an article in The Telegraph, “Old Master paintings shown to be ‘crusting over’ by microscope 10 billion times brighter than the Sun.” Dr. Stephen Price explains in the article,

His work has also appeared on the Physics World website,  “Diamond Light Source – when a tool becomes a gem”.

“Stephen Price, a researcher at Finden and formerly a Diamond Light Source scientist, is currently working with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on a sample of Rembrandt’s painting “Homer”, which dates back to 1663. As he explains, the sample is of a white bloom or crust that forms on the painting despite the best efforts of conservationists. His aim has been to identify the chemistry of the crust and hopefully determine how to prevent such crusts forming.

Using the microfocus X-ray beam at Diamond to scan the sample at different angles, they were able to show how the lead paint had reacted with atmospheric pollutants including sulphur dioxide, which was forming the white crust disfiguring the painting. “Using this information the conservation team at the Rijks can investigate further how to prevent and reverse this degradation process,” says Price.”

Excerpt from article. Read the full article at Physics World.

We have just published an article relating to the Homer painting – Unravelling the spatial dependency of the complex solid-state chemistry of Pb in a paint micro-sample from Rembrandt’s Homer using XRD-CT – Chemical Communications (RSC Publishing). Read more about this exciting work at https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2019/cc/c8cc09705d