James Leman's glorious palette - Part 3 • V&A Blog

This series of blog entries describes the scientific analysis of pigments and dyes used on the Leman Album designs.

As described in my previous instalment of the Leman analysis chronicle, the first MOLAB group came and went at the beginning of March 2017. Three weeks later, the second MOLAB group arrived from the National Institute of Optics (INO-CNR) in Florence, Italy, with their own portable scientific equipment, a multispectral imaging system.

Figure 1: Leman design E.1861:98-1991 being analysed with a multispectral imaging system. Photography by Lucia Burgio © Victoria and Albert Museum.

Figure 2: Scientist Marco Barucci at the multispectral imaging equipment.

Multispectral imaging is a wonderful technique that uses visible and infrared light to reveal what may lie under the surface of an object.

It also provides information on the type of pigments and other materials which may have been used on the object. For example, when some of our Leman designs were investigated with this technique, we were able to see the pencil sketches under the colours and find out if Leman had changed his mind about his designs.

Figure 3: Leman design (left) and one of the corresponding multispectral images showing the pencil underdrawing (right). The latter shows that originally Leman intended a small dot to be present in the centre of the dark blue diamonds. Image by Rosarosa Manca © Victoria and Albert Museum.

We could also spot areas that had been retouched at some point.

Figure 4: Leman design (left) and one of the corresponding multispectral images (right). The black arrow shows a change of shape of a detail; the white arrow points to a repainted area. Image by Rosarosa Manca © Victoria and Albert Museum.

Three months later it was the turn of MOLAB 2, a group from the Centre for Research on the Conservation of Collections, Paris (known as the CRC). They came to the V&A with their hyperspectral imaging system and provided us with additional information about the materials and processes used to make the Leman designs.