Painting restoration
Cleaning, tears, flaking and old retouching — what can be put right on a canvas or panel, and when it repays the cost.
Most pictures that look beyond help are dirty rather than damaged. A century of smoke and household dust sits on the varnish rather than in the paint, and removing it is reversible work that a good conservator does slowly. The interventions that worry a saleroom are the structural ones, and those are worth understanding before anyone starts.
What can be put right
Surface dirt and discoloured varnish
The commonest job and usually the most transformative. Natural resin varnishes yellow and then brown with age, which flattens the whole picture and turns skies green. Removing and replacing the varnish is standard, reversible conservation, and it is the intervention most likely to pay for itself on a saleable picture.
Tears, punctures and flaking paint
A tear in a canvas is repairable and, done properly, becomes very hard to see. Flaking and cupping paint is consolidated before anything else happens, because a picture shedding paint loses a little more every time it is moved. Both are jobs where waiting makes the work larger rather than the problem smaller.
Structural work — lining, stretchers and panels
Relining a slack or torn canvas, replacing a stretcher that has distorted, stabilising a panel that has split or whose cradle is fighting the wood. This is the expensive end, and it is where the cost most often outruns what the picture is worth. It is also the work a specialist will identify at a glance, so it must be disclosed.
Old retouching that has aged badly
Retouching is matched to the paint around it on the day it is done, and then the two age at different rates — a repair invisible in 1975 can read as a grey patch now. Ultraviolet light shows it immediately, which is how a saleroom will see it. Removing and redoing it is routine.
What cannot be undone
Over-cleaning is permanent. A picture taken down too far loses the artist's own final glazes and thin modelling, and nothing brings those back — this is the single most common way a painting is damaged by the attempt to improve it. Pigments faded by decades of direct sunlight do not return either. And a picture that has been substantially repainted by someone else cannot be recovered to what it was; at best the overpaint comes off and what is underneath is what you have.
Is it worth doing?
Cleaning a picture with a real market usually repays itself several times over, because buyers bid on what they can see. Structural work rarely does on a modest painting — relining can cost more than the picture will make, and a saleroom will still catalogue it as relined. We would rather tell you that from the photographs than after a studio has quoted.
The work is carried out by a conservation studio we work with, not in-house, and the cost is quoted before anything begins. How restoration works here sets out the whole of that arrangement. If you do not yet know what the work is, a valuation comes first and costs nothing — it is the thing that decides whether any of this is worth spending.