GC-MS and SEM studies on the effects of solvent cleaning on old master paintings from the National Gallery, London

AbstractAbstractThis paper adopts a new approach to cleaning research, made possible by recent developments in sample derivatization. For the first time, an extensive analytical study has been made of the solvent cleaning of a range of paintings from the early fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Direct analytical comparisons are made between samples from mechanically and solvent-cleaned test areas of both tempera and oil paintings, using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).