ABSTRACT
By 1965, within the first ten years of the commercial introduction of water-borne acrylic dispersions as a fine art material, all but one of the major manufacturers noted in J. Gutierrez and N. Roukes’s book Painting with Acrylics had in their acrylic line at least one acrylic varnish. The available assortment of varnish products is extensive, yet within art conservation there exist significant, long-lasting disputes as to the efficacy and ethics of any of these varnish choices for paintings painted with acrylic polymer dispersion. The most common acrylic dispersion used in artists’ paints is a combination of butyl acrylate and methyl methacrylate. The assortment of products recommended by artists’ paint manufacturers can be divided into two general categories: those that are potentially removable and those that are intended to be a permanent finish on the paint surface. The majority of non-removable topcoats contain the same copolymers that make up the acrylic dispersion paints.
