The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: Marten van Cleve the Elder. An Outdoor Wedding Dance. This painting is on an oak panel with two main joints. It has been cradled probably early in the last century, with two small extra strips added more recently to support in particular the top right and the top left of the uppermost section, where quite strong cracks have developed. The original cradle has double supporting bars behind only the upper joint, with the evidently more stable lower joint having just a brief narrow line of retouching at the left end for about 10 or 15cm, with the remainder of the joint never having moved. The figures are in exceptionally good condition almost throughout and the lovely middle and far distance is also beautifully intact and unworn. As tends frequently to be the case the ground between the figures, which was most lightly painted, was most vulnerable and has been worn in many places. Where slightly more vigorous denser paint was used that has remained intact, but elsewhere much of the immediate foreground and the interstices between the figures up into the middle distance appears to have been patchily worn and then retouched. Occasionally this has affected the figures as well, as for instance in the further arm of the man in the central pair of dancers. The drawing can just be seen in places through the translucent brushwork of the lighter areas of some figures. The skirt of the woman on the right appears to have had some decorative but impermanent pigment in the design. Another dancer on the left has a scattering of little darkened retouchings in her purple drapery. In the distance a possible pentiment can be seen in the central tree against the sky, which was once clearly wider. The exceptionally fine condition enables many of the vivid characters across the painting to be described in rare sweeps of intact brushwork, including minute vignettes of infants caught in a moment in a distant corner. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
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