Research Summary

My work, included in the Crossing Borders project, aims to characterise the materials and methods of two Portuguese naturalist painters, Silva Porto and João Marques de Oliveira, within a multidisciplinary perspective. Documentary research on artists' techniques and materials, complemented by historically accurate paint reconstructions will be exploited for a full characterization/understanding of their paint materials. Based both on the reconstructions and on the analytical data from the artworks, 19th century naturalist oil paint formulations will be reproduced and studied. In order to gain more insight into the degradation of oil paints over time, photodegradation studies will be carried out with these reconstructions and the results compared to those found in the original artworks. A collection of 36 oil paint tubes from the late 19th is being analysed by EDXRF, XRD, FORS, FTIR and Raman, in order to build a trusted database of artists’ oil paints from that period.

PhD Project Title: Materials and techniques of the portuguese Naturalism: the cases of Silva Porto and Marques de Oliveira.

Supervisors: Maria João Melo (REQUIMTE, DCR FCT/UNL), Leslie Carlyle (REQUIMTE, DCR FCT/UNL); Márcia Vilarigues (VICARTE, DCR FCT/UNL)