Caring for the Paintings in Your Home: What Conservators Want You to Know

A painting hung opposite a sunny window and lit at night by a picture lamp clipped to its frame can look perfectly fine for years. Both choices appear on the list of things the Canadian Conservation Institute asks owners to avoid. The damage they cause is slow, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed until the colors have faded or the paint has started to lift.

The institute's guidance on paintings is written for collections, but most of it applies just as well to a living room.

Keep the air steady

A painting is made of materials that react to moisture in different ways. Canvas, a wooden stretcher, layers of paint and the glue sizing between them all swell and shrink as the humidity changes, and they do not move together. Over time that strain shows up as cracks and flaking.

The Canadian Conservation Institute's advice is to keep the relative humidity around a painting stable. At home that means paying attention to where it hangs. A spot close to a heat source or in the path of a heating or cooling vent changes temperature and humidity many times a day. A small digital hygrometer costs little and shows quickly whether a wall is calm or swings with every cycle of the heating.

Watch the light

Light fades pigments and yellows some varnishes, and the effect adds up over the years. The guidance here is simple: do not place a painting in direct sunlight, and do not focus spotlights or picture lamps on it. A picture lamp sits a few centimeters from the surface and heats it as well as lighting it. If you want a painting lit, indirect light from across the room is the gentler choice.

Handle it as little as possible

Every time a painting comes off the wall, it can be knocked, dropped or pressed in the wrong place. The institute recommends non-slip gloves and a grip that touches neither the painted face nor the open back of the canvas, since a hand pressed against the back can leave a dent or a crack visible from the front. Large paintings are a job for two people, one on each side, with the route cleared before anyone lifts.

Leave the cleaning to a professional

The most tempting mistake is trying to clean a painting yourself. A yellowed varnish can make a picture look dull and brown, and solvents sold for the job are easy to buy. The Canadian Conservation Institute is direct about this: never attempt to remove discolored resin layers, such as old varnish, or to make repairs yourself, and have the painting examined by a professional paintings conservator.

What happens in a conservation studio

Conservators work in a set order. Merkel Technologies' overview of art conservation describes it well: a close examination comes first, followed by documentation, with detailed condition reports and photographs taken before, during and after treatment. Those records become part of the painting's permanent history and guide whoever works on it next.

The treatment itself follows two principles: the work must end up stable, and anything the conservator does should be reversible. In practice that can mean removing surface dirt, consolidating flaking paint so it stops falling away, repairing tears in the canvas by reweaving it thread by thread or setting in a fabric inlay, and then filling losses and retouching them to match the surrounding paint.

Science has added a few tools along the way. Infrared imaging lets conservators see beneath the surface, where the artist's preparatory drawing often survives. It has also turned up whole pictures under familiar ones: portraits of men were found beneath two of Picasso's paintings, The Blue Room and Woman Ironing.

When to call someone

Dust on the frame and a painting that has shifted on its hook are things you can handle yourself. Flaking paint, a tear or a dent in the canvas, mold, or a varnish that has turned yellow are signs to stop and contact a professional paintings conservator, before anyone tries to fix it with good intentions and a cotton swab.