'The Mill' : Restoration or Destruction?

Depending on the timeperiod, when you stand in front of The Mill, your interpretation will greatly vary. At first you see a mill on a steep bulwark, above calm, tranquil water, and storm clouds are gathering behind it with the last light of the sun catching its sails. There are little figures in the foreground: a woman washing clothes on the edge of the river, a man leaning against the wall, a rower all but invisible in a boat. They are staffage, they animate the scene without being its subject. The subject, however, is the sky, and what the sky does to everything beneath it. The foreground is anchored by its earthy composition; above it, drama builds. This reading, however, of the brooding, sublime, and psychologically overwhelming composition, is not simply that of Rembrandt. This was the way the painting looked after centuries of darkening varnish. When the work was catalogued in Orléans in 1786, contemporary descriptions praised its harmony and the accuracy of its natural observation. There was no gloom, no drama, no romantic intensity. The varnish had not yet developed. By the time the painting reached Britain in 1793 and entered circulation among the Romantics, it was becoming something else. Of its "inestimable gloom" and a "veil of matchless colour" which "enthralled" the eye, Turner, who had seen it at the British Institution in 1806, spoke. In 1836 Constable, lecturing, called it "a picture wholly made by chiaroscuro". These are not descriptions of Rembrandt's original intentions. They are instead, responses to what time and chemistry had produced on top of them. In the 1977-1979 restoration, the darkened varnish was removed to reveal the blue-grey skies and salmon sails that Rembrandt actually painted. The painting has gained in colourfulness but lost in sublimity. A frank and unsettling transformation: what two centuries of viewers had accepted as the greatness of the painting was, at least partly, decay. The James Ward copy, criticised in 1864 for lacking the original's "gloomy solemnity", had been made before the varnish darkened – so it was closer to Rembrandt's painting than the "original" it was being compared to. So The Mill asks a question that blurs the line between ethics and psychology of conservation: when is the sum of changes of an object indistinguishable from its emotional power and is restoration preserving the work or destroying it? It is not a simple answer – and the painting, still on permanent display, still refuses to make it easy.