Preserving Our Heritage

The Mauritshuis houses some of the most beautiful and well-known paintings in the world - Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson", Vermeer's "View of the Delft" and "Girl with a Pearl Earring", to name but a few. These paintings have to be treated with the utmost care and the Mauritshuis is fortunate to be one of the few museums with an in-house restoration studio. This book opens a window into the conservation studio. The most important conservation and restoration treatments of the past two decades are outlined by means of fourteen case studies. Numerous illustrations reveal the paintings' original colours reappearing from underneath layers of discoloured varnish, and the sometimes spectacular metamorphosis these works have undergone. Moreover, the most interesting findings yielded by research conducted with state-of-the-art techniques are discussed. Discover what materials Vermeer used, what Rembrandt's last self-portrait originally looked like or how a group of at least sixteen Antwerp artists collaborated on a single painting. Two introductory chapters provide background information on the Old Master working methods, as well as how paintings in the Mauritshuis have been conserved and restored in the past two hundred years. In the course of this account it becomes clear that the occupation of restorer had been developed from a craft into a technically advance and specialised profession, one in which art and hi-tech go hand in hand.