Face Lifting in Brooklyn

The lady in the picture had good looks and a title: Lady Georgiana Gordon. Moreover, she was by the respected hand of 18th Century British Portraitist John Hoppner. But she was in poor condition, her complexion sallowed by a thick coat of yellow varnish. When the Brooklyn Museum got her as a gift in 1934, officials dismissed Lady Georgiana as an inferior Hoppner, sent her to the basement. Recently, Brooklyn assigned Restorer Sheldon Keck to give her a thorough face lifting.

Keck gave the portrait a good going-over with a magnifying glass, then with X-ray photographs. Sure enough, under the pretty features lay another shadowy face. For three months, Keck worked painstakingly with a solvent mixture, cotton swabs and a delicate scalpel, removed the varnish and the top layer of paint. As he worked, a totally different young lady appeared. Writes Keck in the current museum Bulletin: "The mouth was wider and less luscious; the nose was longer and definitely hooked . . . the eyes were smaller and not so soft and liquid. The entire shape of the face was subtly different and more mouselike, receding especially at the chin."

Who had given the mousy lady her later look? Most probably, says Keck, some unknown craftsman of 50 years ago or so who wanted to pretty her up for prospective buyers. In reworking the face, the painter might even have tried for a faithful likeness of Lady Georgiana Gordon: the top picture bore some resemblance to a contemporary drawing of her. But who was the restored lady? Brooklyn hasn't solved that problem yet.

Stripped of her glamour and pedigree, however, the plain-faced miss struck museum officials as an all-round better piece of art. Last week she was upstairs, entitled simply A Lady.

George Washington also turned up in the art news again--this time as a rather foxy-faced gentleman in a braided blue jacket. A picture portraying him in such fashion, long mistitled A Naval Officer, now hangs in Sulgrave Manor, ancestral Northamptonshire home of the Washington family.

Scottish Artist Archibald Robertson painted it in 1792, on commission from Washington's distant kinsman, the eleventh Earl of Buchan. The earl's fancy: to have a picture of his revolutionary relation as first President of the U.S. Supposedly mislaid, the picture was found hanging in the hall of the 15th earl in 1939, identified as Robertson's Washington. Last May, the earl sent it off to Sulgrave Manor (since 1914 a Washington shrine). Not especially publicity conscious, Sulgrave Manor just got around to announcing the acquisition last week.

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