Most people are familiar with canvas, but for centuries artists have painted on all kinds of supports: metal, stone, glass, cardboard, and plastic, among other things. Dutch and Flemish artists from the 17th century often liked to paint on wooden panels.
Recently, a team of curators, conservators, and scientists began a three-year project to closely examine paintings from this part of the collection and are looking closer at the panels to understand how they were made and what has happened to them in the centuries since. Paintings live long and interesting lives—and sometimes the back of the painting can be as fascinating as the front.
Here are five paintings on wood that each tell a different story. A good first example is Still Life by Pieter Claesz, a Haarlem-based artist renowned for depictions of sumptuous foods and opulent serving vessels set on a tabletop.
Panel paintings, like all wood, expand and contract in response to changes in humidity, and before museums were able to provide a stable climate, all this movement would sometimes result in damage to the painting. Many of the wood panels in the collection look a lot like the back of Claesz’s painting.
Back of Still Life showing the lattice structure called a cradle.
The lattice structure on the back—called a cradle—was not there when the artist painted his arrangement of tasty morsels. Instead, it was attached by a restorer, probably in the 19th or early 20th century, and if you have ever seen a piece of wood warp or split, you know why. Though cradles were intended to prevent this damage, they were often attached using lots of glue, which restricted the panel’s natural movement and actually ended up causing splits.
Often, putting a cradle on a painting erases toolmarks and other clues that could help us understand how a panel was constructed 400 years ago. This was unfortunately the case for Still Life, though it did also reveal something new. Before the cradle was placed on the back of the Claesz painting, the back surface of the panel was planed down to make it flat—something we would never do today. This process revealed that the panel, which is actually two planks of wood joined together by glue, was strengthened with a pair of wooden dowels. Peeking out from behind the cradle, you can see the drill holes for the two dowels, and a small fragment of one of the dowels is still there.
Detail revealing drill holes for the dowels that helped join the two pieces of wood.
The panel Breakfast Still LIfe by Willem Claesz Heda—Pieter Claesz’s main rival in Haarlem—previously had a cradle (with a slightly different design) but it was removed before the painting was acquired by the museum in 2023.
You can still make out traces of this old cradle on the reverse. Note the light-colored wood where the old cradle had been attached. The diagram shows how the cradle would have worked before it was removed.
You might also be able to make out two long horizontal splits in the wood near the bottom of the painting. It is hard to know if the old cradle caused these splits or if they were the reason the cradle was put on. At any rate, after the cradle was removed someone glued ten shallow blocks of wood over the splits to help stabilize them.
While many old panel paintings have had cradles attached in the past, some panels managed to escape this fate and come to us essentially untouched. Alpheus and Arethusa by Moyses van Uyttenbroeck, an artist from The Hague who painted mythological and religious scenes, is one such example.
Conservators and curators get unusually excited by paintings like this one, which act as a time capsule from another time and place, transporting us back to the side of the artist at work. Diagonal saw marks across its back surface tell us this board was hand sawn, even though the first machine-operated sawmill near Amsterdam opened nearly thirty years before the painting was made.
The panel’s shape is interesting, too. It is not a flat board, but rather is cut into a wedge shape—thicker at the top and thinner at the bottom. Panels for paintings were often cut out of wedges that had been riven out of a tree trunk like slices of a pie. This would give you a more dimensionally stable board while limiting the amount of wasted wood.
The panelmaker then cut bevels into the top edge and two sides to allow the artist to fit the painting into a frame when it was finished, using nails to keep it from falling out the back.
Note the bevels cut into top and sides of the panel.
The panel of the painting Esther before Ahasuerus by Frans Francken II, a Flemish master from Antwerp, is another example that is also essentially untouched.
On this panel—a recent acquisition by the museum—branding irons were used in the 17th century to burn marks that are, admittedly, hard to see with the naked eye after all these years.
One of the marks, a set of three towers with two hands hovering above, is the coat of arms of the city of Antwerp. This mark tells us that the panel was made there and that it was a good quality product made by a member of the local panel-maker’s guild. They were right—this panel is still in remarkably good condition more than 400 years after it was made.
While artists in northern Europe painted on many different types of wood—walnut, chestnut, and beech among them—Dutch and Flemish painters most commonly used oak, which is what Claesz, Heda, Uyttenbroeck, and Francken all used for the paintings mentioned above. Occasionally, though, we come across something a bit different. Our initial examination of A Witches’ Sabbath by Cornelis Saftleven suggests it was painted on a tropical species of wood, which moves it up to the top of our list for further research.
The Dutch have long been a seafaring country. In the 17th century ships set out from Amsterdam and traveled around the world. Many of these expeditions brought back new and different materials. How such a panel might have made its way to the artist’s studio in Rotterdam is anyone’s guess at this point, but it is fascinating to consider the many routes it might have taken.
Our investigations on the museum’s collection of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish panels are just beginning. Recently, we hosted a dendrochronologist, Dr. Marta Domínguez-Delmás of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, to study our panels from a very different angle. She photographed the growth rings on each of these planks of wood, and she will use her images to identify where in the world the tree grew and in what year it was cut down. This will help us refine the dates of some of our paintings to better understand artists and their workshop practices, and it can give us more insight into trade routes of the 17th-century timber industry.
Some of the most famous and beautiful paintings in the Art Institute’s 17th-century Dutch and Flemish collection are on wood panels. The next time you are in the galleries, take a closer look—not just at the painted composition, but also at the texture of the paint to see if you can tell what kind of support is underneath. You can sometimes recognize canvas from its bumpy weave pattern, while wood is smoother and might be slightly curved and have joins between two or more boards. You might even be able to spot some wood grain where the paint is thin. If you can manage this, then you too just might feel yourself transported back to the side of the artist at work in the studio 400 years ago.
—Gerrit Albertson, associate conservator of paintings, Conservation and Science
Stay tuned for updates as our research progresses and look out for the Art Institute’s Dutch and Flemish online collection catalogue, coming your way in 2029.
citations
Wadum, Jørgen. “Historical Overview of Panel-Making Techniques in the Northern Countries.” In The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings: Proceedings of a Symposium at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 24-28 April 1995., eds. Kathleen Dardes and Andrea Rothe. Getty Conservation Institute, 1998.
Wadum, Jørgen. “A History of the Making and Conservation of the Dutch and Flemish Paintings in the Nivaagaard Collection.” In Dutch and Flemish Painting at The Nivaagaard Collection. The Nivaagaard Collection, 2024.
Wetering, Ernst van de. Rembrandt: the painter at work. Second edition. Amsterdam University Press, 2009.
