04/26/2025
When I am at a cocktail party and someone asks, “So what do you do?” This is often a moment to pause and consider how much to say about a field like art conservation, where there are so many misconceptions. Conservators are often put in a position to educate the masses one person at a time, without being too pedantic or just plain boring. When I say I am a paintings conservator, it is not uncommon to hear, “So you are an artist and you just paint on the painting?” Although technically correct, it is more nuanced than that.
Conservators have a set of skills that overlap with those of an artist. Many conservators are extremely skilled in using the methods an artist would use, but there is a big difference. “Inpainting,” the word we use for retouching, is highly specialized work where we use conservation-grade materials, not oil paints, that are specifically designed for conservation. They are color fast, resist fading from natural processes or UV light, and are fully reversible in case they need to be removed later for any reason, including the development of better materials.
Inpainting is often performed under magnification with small sable brushes and intense light of a specific color temperature (e.g. 3600° Kelvin). There are several strategies, such as using Pointillistic dots, employing Tratteggio (thin lines of color or hatch marks), glazing, and/or scumbling. Rather than using a magic marker like some people suggest, we are concerned with accurate color matching, reproducing the opacity or transparency of the paint film, accurately capturing the same surface reflectivity as the surrounding area, imitating the natural patina of an aged paint film, and mimicking the surface texture so as not to create visual disturbances from surface irregularities. Also, as we learned in kindergarten, we try to color within the lines, meaning that our inpainting strategies are limited to the areas of loss only, so we are not going to “improve” a painting by adding a moustache to Aunt Edith’s portrait or putting a cow in the sky. A real conservator's job is to honor both the artist's intent and the artwork's history.
This is an excerpt from the Dordrechts Museum website: “The restoration of the Family Group of Diederick Hoeufft and Maria de Witt…, which Caspar Netscher painted in 1664. The face of Maria …had almost completely disappeared during an earlier [unsuccessful] restoration. Thanks to an exact copy of Maria's portrait, it was now possible to return her face” back to what the artist intended. This is a special case where the missing pictorial elements are reconstructed to integrate the painting and make it more readable. In this case, the conservators are making a deliberate choice to “resurrect” a painting based on an existing copy. It is rare to have a nearly exact copy as a reference point, but as you may have ascertained, we are now entering the realm of “what is an ethical treatment?” Decisions in art conservation are rarely black and white. Conservators sometimes must embrace the divine discontent of living in a world with shades of gray.
