My name is Sarah Drew, and I work as an art conservator
at Center Art Studio in New York City.
This is a portrait of Madame Vestris.
The first thing we do is inspect the painting
with a blacklight to understand what all the issues are.
So you see the purple light,
and then you see the kinda, like, the greenish light?
That indicates to us that there's, like a heavy,
thick old varnish on that surface.
If there wasn't that, you would just see pure purple.
You couldn't make out any sort of contrast
or light in the background.
The ornament and the details on her clothes
were completely obscured.
There was something on her head;
we weren't sure if it was a hat or if it was hair.
When you're running the Q-tip over the painting,
it can be quite black or quite orange or yellow depending
on what you're taking off.
Her skin was beautiful.
It was bright, it had brushstrokes, color contrast, light.
The first step of removing the painting from the stretcher
is to take out all of the tacks
that are holding the sides of the canvas onto the stretcher.
I'll save them and I'm gonna reuse them later.
You can see me using a knife to separate the lining canvas
fully from the structure.
Now comes the riskiest part,
separating the painting from the stretcher.
You want to be very careful
because if the paint is not stable,
you risk bending the painting and causing flaking
or further damage.
I need to cut strips of linen
and attach them to the canvas
so that I can then put the whole piece back together again.
I cut strips of BEVA, which is a conservator's adhesive.
I then put the painting on the stretcher
and use tacks to reattach the painting to its stretcher
Then I filled, with a water based putty, areas of damage.
And I overfill the areas a little bit,
and then I come back in with a damp cotton swab
and clean up those fills.
Also, the original canvas doesn't extend quite to the edges
of the stretcher so I need to go and fill
about a quarter of an inch
around the entire perimeter of the painting.
Once the painting is filled,
I will begin the retouching process.
I will use a paint that is specifically designed
for conservation work.
You're just trying to match the color
to the color that the artist put there,
and making sure that you're not painting over
any of that original paint.
There's two types of inpainting that I will do here.
The first is inpainting over the fills that I just made.
The second is inpainting the background.
And this is the area that was previously overcleaned
by the other restorer.
It's really important to use a conservation paint
that dissolves in a solvent that is different
than the original paint.
And this allows our paint to be completely reversible.
We could easily use that solvent to take off our paint
and then the original paint would be unaffected.
Then I will be ready for varnish.
We use a completely reversible non-yellowing varnish.
I need to wipe off the surface of the painting
with just a cloth because, like anything,
it can accumulate little particles of dust, little hairs.
I wanna make sure that that surface is as clean as possible.
So once I wipe it off, I will brush on the varnish.
When you brush on the varnish,
those fills, that inpainting, it all kind of blends
cohesively into the background
and into the surface of the painting
and it just looks complete.
And the restoration is complete.