Tennants Auctioneers
Lot 511
John Syer RI (1815-1885)"Neath Valley"Indistinctly signed?, oil on canvas, 64cm by 88.5cmThe canvas tacking margins are degraded and ripped in places at the reverse, with some splits and missing areas. There is an old stretcher, one key lacking, and the stretcher has battens affixed around the edge under the canvas. There is fair tension to the canvas, and an old restorers stamp to the back of the canvas. There is a fine brittle age craquelure throughout, and a few areas of impact cracking, all stable with no elevation or history of flaking. There is a more visually disturbing network of fairly broad drying cracks to the landscape. These are visible in reflected light. They have been suppressed in an old campaign of restoration, but said restoration has discoloured in places in the lighter forground and now appears darker than the original paint. There is also slight wrinkling of the paint, also associated with drying issues. There are incised scratch marks in the top right corner, which appear to have been done when the paint was wet. There is one old lumpy filled and retouched upsidedown 'L' shape loss in the sky top left, opaque/milky patches in places in the dark foliage, a few fresher white scratches bottom left, and some milky blotches to the mid left. There is some thinning to the delicate glazed paint of the foliage, and darker areas of rock, possibly reinforced with retouching. There is a fairly yellowed old varnish, fairly even, but with some shiny patches to the green mid-distance on the right. A light layer of surface dirt.
