Brief Report
This rigorously pointillist painting has been preserved unrestored and virtually unchanged apart from one slight retouching, and it shows the characteristic dot-pattern of the well considered and carefully executed pictorial structure. The IR reflectogram brings out in particular the systematic arrangement of the individual colours (fig. 5).
Finch made a careful underdrawing of his motif on the pale surface of the pre-primed canvas and then composed a first distribution of colour fields and the shaded areas with largish dabs of paint. In several sessions, each time allowing the previous coat to dry, he “condensed” the fields with increasingly smaller dots of paint. Slight depressions and scratches on lower-lying dabs and colour fields point to the picture having been handled between the individual phases of work (fig. 11).
The careful and well-planned working method is also clear from the continuation of the pencil underdrawing in the painting process (fig. 10). Relative to the underdrawing, Finch changed only small details: an arch motif in the area of the houses in the background, and the contour of the field in front show discrepancies. Even though many areas are laid in with more than two colours, there is a predominant use of complementary hues, e.g. blue and yellow or green and orange-red. No use whatever was made of black. The colours come across as pure and unmixed. The limpid character of the painting also results from the incorporation of the pale ground into the colour scheme (fig. 6).
Willi Finch
Village near the North Sea Coast, c. 1889, oil on Canvas, 57.5 x 71.0 cm, WRM Dep. FC 711
Willi Finch
born on 28 November 1854 in Bruxelles,
died on 28 April 1930 in Helsinki
Fig. 02
Verso
Fig. 03
Raking light
Fig. 04
Transmitted-light photograph, illustrating the size, density and distribution of the countless dots of paint
Fig. 05
IR reflectogram
Fig. 06
Detail, bottom left-hand corner with initials
Fig. 07
Detail, UV-fluorescence photograph, glowing fluorescence of dabs of rose madder
Fig. 08
Detail, stretch-marks (arrow) on the top edge of the canvas, with edge of painted area
Fig. 09
Illustrating painting technique, wet-over-dry microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 10
Line of underdrawing on the paint-layer, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)
Fig. 11
Traces of scratches on underlying paint layers indicate intermediate storage or mechanical stress during the drying
process, microscopic photograph, (M = 1 mm) (arrows)
Fig. 12
Crystalline efflorescence on green dabs of paint; microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)