Connecting palettes — An integrated spectroscopic analysis and UMAP visualisation of Wu Guanzhong's paint palette and his painting

Abstract

A paint palette of the 20th-century Chinese modern artist Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010) was studied with an integrated spectroscopic approach, macro-scale non-invasive techniques hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF), complemented with Raman spectroscopy. The palette is revealed to be comprised of synthetic inorganic and organic pigments, typical of the 20th century modern palette that is dominated by azo and phthalocyanine pigments. HSI datasets of the paint palette and those of Wu's oil painting ‘Xidi Village’ (2001) were then processed within one unsupervised Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) model, in an attempt to identify connections between the artefact and the artwork, so that known pigment results of the palette may provide preliminary pigment assignment for the painting. This study describes the steps taken to establish this automated assisted pigment analysis workflow, which involves processing multiple HSI datasets within one UMAP model, density clustering, non-negative least square (NNLS) fitting to extract endmembers (EM) spectra and to generate distribution maps. The approach to perform micro-sampling pigment analysis on the artist's palette (or artist's materials) is considered less invasive to the integrity than that from artworks, the results of which have demonstrated to serve as a critical resource to support further pigment analysis studies of the artist's paintings via non-invasive analytical techniques.