The painting restoration that brought the devil back to life
So, here’s a fun fact for you. In the weird and wonderful world of art, very few pieces are ever released as the thing they were first conceived as, whether they’re a book, a movie, or a painting.
Batman: Arkham Asylum was pitched as a campy rhythm action game in thrall to the 1960s Batman TV show rather than the grim, dark game that we received in the end. Toy Story was initially made as a dark comedy where Woody was the terrifying villain of the piece, and not the gallant, yet flawed hero of it. The first drafts of what would become Tamsin Muir’s gothic space opera, The Locked Tomb, were written as a period boarding school drama. The world of painting is no different.
One might assume, as I did, that one draft of a painting would be contained on one canvas. That shows just how little I know about the act of painting, because if that were the case, painting would be one of the most expensive forms of art imaginable. Canvas costs money, and thus, one painting might have dozens of early drafts hiding underneath it, and there are several very famous examples of this hidden among some of the most famous paintings imaginable.
In the Mona Lisa itself are hints that earlier versions of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece lie further inside the canvas, behind the masterpiece we all know today. Picasso’s Old Guitarist seems to be haunted by figures from earlier drafts that give the finished version even more depth and beauty than it already has. These are almost always uncovered by restorations and rigorous examination, however, and most of the time, they simply uncover aborted versions of what the finished draft shows.
One can only imagine how disturbed the folks in charge of restoring Joshua Reynolds’s The Death of Cardinal Beaufort were when they saw what their work revealed.
So, what did this painting restoration reveal?
Joshua Reynolds is one of the most revered portrait painters of his age. A famously prolific artist, Reynolds was responsible for over 2000 paintings in his lifetime.
A figure which gets even more absurd when you consider what we were talking about earlier regarding the sheer amount of preparation and drafting time that even (some would say especially) master artists need for their work. When he wasn’t painting the most celebrated and famous names of his age, though, Reynolds painted scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.
This is where The Death of Cardinal Beaufort comes into the picture. The titular death is not a real demise of a real person, but a fictional death of a character from Shakespeare’s Henry VI. In July 2023, the 300th anniversary of Reynolds’s birth, several of his paintings were restored by the National Trust. One of these paintings was The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, and in restoring the piece, they found a segment of the painting that had been scrubbed out and painted over several times previously.
Buried deep under the excess paint was a horrific, ghoulish devil figure gurning directly over the stricken body of the Cardinal. Of this discovery, the National Trust’s senior national curator for pictures and sculptures said that the figure “didn’t fit in with some of the artistic rules of the times to have a poetic figure of speech represented so literally in this monstrous figure.”
Thus, after several controversial early exhibits, the figure was painted over and removed from history.
Until now. After all, you can’t keep a good devil down.
