WOODEN STRETCHER
You can also think of the stretcher (Fig. 3), the wooden frame on which the painting is supported, as the spring which holds up the mattress; and the bedstead itself as the frame for the painting. This is all very exaggerated but has useful points of similarity. For instance, the spring which holds up a mattress can be nothing more than the hard tight cloth of an army cot or it can be a de luxe model with perfect hand-tied coils. The wooden stretcher onto which the canvas is tacked is not always a properly constructed frame; it is sometimes a very crude quadrilateral with no two sides parallel and no corner a right angle. This can pull the entire painting out of shape and ruin it as a poor spring can spoil a bed, no matter how much trouble you -- or the artist in his case -- takes with the rest of it.
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