Art conservation and restoration basics

In short

Art conservation is the care of cultural property so that it survives with its physical fabric and meaning intact; restoration is the narrower act of returning a damaged object to a stable, legible state. The discipline rests on three ideas — examine before you act, do the least that works, and make every addition reversible and documentable. A BFA/BVA student meets it as a paper under "profession and careers" because it is one of the few fine-arts careers with a formal qualification route (National Museum Institute, Delhi; NRLC Lucknow; Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda) and salaried government posts. Employers include the Archaeological Survey of India, National Museum and National Gallery of Modern Art, state departments of archaeology and museums, INTACH's conservation centres, CSMVS Mumbai, private studios serving galleries and collectors, and auction houses. Exams test material science of artists' media, agents of deterioration, treatment sequences, environmental figures and the legal framework of the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972 and the AMASR Act, 1958.

Explained

Definitions, scope and the ethical frame

• Conservation: all actions aimed at safeguarding cultural heritage while ensuring accessibility to present and future generations — includes examination, documentation, preventive care, treatment and research.
• Preventive (indirect) conservation: action on the *environment and handling*, not on the object — climate control, light control, pest management, storage, packing, disaster planning. Cheapest per object and protects whole collections at once.
• Curative / remedial conservation: direct intervention to arrest an active process — consolidating flaking paint, deacidifying paper, removing corrosive salts from bronze.
• Restoration: intervention to recover a lost or obscured appearance — filling losses, inpainting, re-assembling. Always aesthetic as well as technical, therefore always a judgement.
• Reconstruction: re-making missing parts from evidence; permissible only where clearly distinguishable from the original.
• Core principles: minimum intervention; reversibility (or at minimum, re-treatability); compatibility of added materials; distinguishability of new work from old; respect for the artist's intent and the object's history including its patina and legitimate age-value; full documentation; and the conservator's duty to decline work beyond their competence.
• Guiding texts: the Venice Charter 1964; the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums; the ECCO and AIC codes of practice; in India the INTACH Charter for the Conservation of Unprotected Architectural Heritage and Sites in India, 2004 and ASI's own conservation manuals. Note the distinction examiners like: the Western charters privilege material authenticity, while Indian and Asian practice has a living tradition of renewal (repainting a temple mural, re-plastering), formalised in the Nara Document on Authenticity, 1994.
• Conservator vs restorer vs conservation scientist: the conservator diagnoses and treats; the restorer's emphasis is on recovering appearance; the conservation scientist runs analysis (pigment identification, dating, condition testing) and usually does not treat objects.

Materials of art and how they fail

• A painting is a stratified structure: support (canvas, wood panel, paper, wall plaster) → sizing → ground/priming (gesso, chalk-glue, lead white in oil) → paint layers (pigment + binder) → varnish. Most damage is interfacial — a layer parting from the one below.
• Binders and their ageing: linseed oil yellows and embrittles, cross-linking for decades; egg tempera becomes very hard and insoluble; animal glue (distemper, Indian miniature and mural grounds) is water-sensitive and food for mould; gum arabic in watercolour stays re-soluble, so watercolours cannot be surface-washed; acrylic emulsion stays soft and picks up dirt, and is swollen by the very solvents used to clean it — the central problem in conserving modern Indian art.
• Pigment chemistry: lead white blackens to lead sulphide in sulphur-polluted air; vermilion (HgS) can darken on light exposure; copper greens (verdigris) can turn brown and attack the support; organic lakes and most dyes fade irreversibly; ultramarine can develop "ultramarine sickness" (whitening) in acid conditions.
• Paper: acid hydrolysis of cellulose from alum-rosin sizing, lignin in wood-pulp paper, and acidic mounts causes browning and brittleness; foxing is brown spotting from iron impurities and fungal activity; iron-gall ink corrodes paper and eats through it.
• Canvas and textile: cellulose/protein fibres weaken, canvas slackens and goes brittle; cupping and craquelure (age cracks) form as support and paint respond differently to humidity; drying cracks appear early from fat-over-lean faults.
• Wood panels and sculpture: anisotropic movement with humidity causes warping, splitting and panel-join failure; insect attack by powder-post beetle and termite; in India, high humidity plus termites is the dominant threat.
• Metals: copper and bronze suffer bronze disease (cyclic active chloride corrosion, pale green powder); silver tarnishes to sulphide; iron rusts, and chloride-contaminated iron spalls.
• Stone and plaster: soluble salt cycling (efflorescence, subflorescence), sulphation of marble and limestone into gypsum crust in polluted air, biological growth, and loss of lime plaster keyed to the wall in murals.
• Modern and contemporary media: plastics (cellulose acetate, PVC, polyurethane foam) have short lifetimes and degrade autocatalytically; photographs, film and magnetic and digital media need their own strategies including format migration; installation and performance art raises the question of conserving the *instruction* rather than the object.

Agents of deterioration and preventive control

The standard list (from the Canadian Conservation Institute, taught in Indian courses) is ten: physical forces; theft and vandalism; fire; water; pests; pollutants; light and UV; incorrect temperature; incorrect relative humidity; and dissociation (loss of data linking object to information).

• Relative humidity (RH) matters more than temperature. A commonly specified museum band is about 45–60% RH, held as stable as possible; fluctuation is more damaging than a steady value slightly off target. Above roughly 65–70% RH, mould and insects become active; below about 40%, wood, ivory and paint embrittle and crack. Indian institutions increasingly set a locally achievable band rather than a European one.
• Temperature: around 20–25 °C for mixed collections; cooler for photographic and film material. Temperature mainly acts by changing RH and by doubling chemical decay rate for roughly every 5–10 °C rise.
• Light: damage is cumulative and irreversible, and depends on illuminance × time. Widely used working limits: about 50 lux for highly light-sensitive material (watercolour, textile, paper, dye-based photographs), about 150–200 lux for oil and tempera paintings, and 300 lux or more for stone, metal and ceramic. UV should be effectively eliminated (filters, UV-free LED). Annual exposure budgets (lux-hours per year) and rotation of works on paper are the practical tools.
• Pollutants: sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone and particulates from traffic; also internal sources — acetic acid from new wood and chipboard showcases, formaldehyde from adhesives, sulphur from wool and rubber. Hence inert case materials, activated-carbon filters, and the Oddy test to screen display materials.
• Pests: integrated pest management (IPM) — inspection, trapping, housekeeping, exclusion and quarantine of incoming objects, preferring anoxic treatment (nitrogen/argon), low-oxygen bags or freezing (about −20 to −30 °C for several days) over toxic fumigants. Methyl bromide is controlled under the Montreal Protocol and is not an ordinary option; older Indian practice used thymol, paradichlorobenzene and naphthalene, now discouraged on health grounds.
• Housekeeping and handling: clean cotton or nitrile gloves (never gloves on glossy ceramics — grip loss), two hands and two people for large frames, trolleys, never carrying a painting by its stretcher bars or top rail alone, and never touching a paint surface.
• Storage and display: acid-free and lignin-free board, buffered or unbuffered as appropriate (unbuffered for protein material such as silk and leather), polyester (Mylar) sleeves, glazing with UV-filtering acrylic for travel, padded crates with a double-case design for transit, and silica gel or Art-Sorb for buffering RH in cases.
• Disaster preparedness: written emergency plan, salvage priority list, flood and fire risk mapping, wet-salvage training. Indian examples examined often: the 1993 and 2011 floods and the fire risk in old city museums; the 2023–24 monsoon damage reports from several state museums.

Examination, documentation and analysis

1. Provenance and condition survey: accession data, artist's technique, previous treatment, a written condition report with a standard damage vocabulary (loss, abrasion, tear, cupping, tenting, cleavage, stain, accretion, deformation).
2. Visual and raking light: raking (grazing) light shows deformation, cupping and texture; transmitted light shows tears and thinning in paper and canvas.
3. UV fluorescence: natural resin varnish fluoresces greenish; retouching and modern materials read as dark patches — the quickest screen for previous restoration.
4. Infrared reflectography (IRR): reveals underdrawing and changes of composition (*pentimenti*) because many pigments are IR-transparent and carbon black is not.
5. X-radiography: shows the support structure, nails, panel joins, lead-containing paint, losses and hidden earlier paintings.
6. Microscopy and cross-sections: stereomicroscope for surface; embedded paint cross-section under polarised light or SEM to read the layer sequence.
7. Instrumental analysis: XRF (elemental, non-destructive, identifies inorganic pigments), FTIR and Raman (molecular, binders and pigments), GC-MS (oils, waxes, resins), SEM-EDX, and radiocarbon dating for organic supports. In India this capacity sits at NRLC Lucknow, the National Museum laboratory, ASI's Science Branch (Dehradun), CSMVS's conservation centre, and university and CSIR laboratories.
8. Solubility and spot testing: cleaning tests in an inconspicuous area, pH measurement of paper, chloride spot tests on metal, salts analysis on stone.
9. Documentation: before/during/after photography under standard lighting with a colour chart and scale, condition diagrams, a treatment proposal approved by the owner or curator, and a treatment record naming every material used and its concentration. An undocumented treatment is professionally worthless.

Treatment processes, medium by medium

Oil and tempera paintings

1. Surface cleaning — soft brush, then aqueous cleaning with controlled pH and conductivity, or gels, to remove grime.
2. Consolidation of flaking or cleaving paint — sturgeon glue, gelatine, funori or a dilute acrylic/Beva adhesive, with gentle local warmth and pressure.
3. Varnish removal — tested solvent mixtures (hydrocarbon + polar solvent, or solvent gels) to take off discoloured natural resin varnish while leaving the paint untouched; the single highest-risk step, and irreversible if overrun.
4. Structural work on the support — tear mending thread by thread, local linings, strip-lining the tacking edges, re-stretching; full lining (relining) is now avoided as over-invasive where a local repair suffices. Wax-resin lining, once routine, is largely abandoned because it is not reversible.
5. Filling losses level with a compatible putty (chalk–glue gesso, or a synthetic filler) textured to match.
6. Inpainting / retouching — only within the area of loss, never over original paint, using a stable, reversible medium whose optical properties (refractive index, gloss, texture) match the surrounding paint, while remaining identifiable because it is confined to the loss, documented, and detectable under UV or by analysis as a different material; techniques include matching, and the visible-at-close-range methods tratteggio / rigatino and *neutral tone*, associated with Cesare Brandi's theory of restoration.
7. Final varnish — a stable, removable synthetic resin, applied to even the gloss and saturate the colours.

Paper and works on paper

• Dry surface cleaning (soft brush, vinyl eraser crumbs), removal of acidic mounts and old tapes, washing to remove acidity and discoloration, deacidification (calcium hydroxide/bicarbonate aqueous, or non-aqueous magnesium alkoxide sprays), light bleaching only when justified, mending with Japanese tissue and wheat-starch paste, lining, flattening, and rehousing in acid-free mounts.

Murals and wall paintings

• *In-situ* work: edging and grouting detached plaster, consolidation with lime or acrylic dispersions, salt reduction by poulticing, removal of overpaint and soot, and environmental control of the cause (rising damp, roof leakage). ASI's work at Ajanta, Ellora and the Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur, and the earlier mistake of applying shellac at Ajanta — which darkened and had to be removed decades later — are standard exam examples of why reversibility is the rule.
• Detachment (*stacco*, *strappo*) is a last resort when the wall cannot be saved.

Sculpture, metal and stone

• Bronze: mechanical and chemical chloride removal, stabilisation with benzotriazole, consolidation, and a protective wax or lacquer coat; display in low RH.
• Stone: dry and wet cleaning, poultice desalination, lime-based mortars and grouts for repair, consolidants used sparingly, and no cement, whose soluble salts and hardness damage historic stone and plaster.
• Wood and ivory sculpture: insect treatment, consolidation of friable wood, gap-filling with reversible fills, and strict RH stability.
• Polychrome sculpture is treated as a painting on a three-dimensional support — the paint film, not the carving, governs the method.

The Indian framework: law, institutions and practice

• Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972 (with the Rules of 1973): an *antiquity* is broadly an object of historical or artistic interest at least 100 years old (75 years for manuscripts and records of scientific/literary value); export of antiquities is prohibited, trade is licensed, and the ASI registers specified classes. A conservator must establish an object's status before advising on movement or sale. A living artist's work is not an antiquity; an "art treasure" is a non-antiquity work declared for its artistic value, and that declaration restricts export.
• Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 and the AMASR (Amendment and Validation) Act, 2010: governs centrally protected monuments and sites, the prohibited (100 m) and regulated (further 200 m) areas, and the National Monuments Authority; ASI carries out structural and chemical conservation under it. State protected monuments fall under state Acts.
• Public Records Act, 1993 for government records; the Delivery of Books and Newspapers (Public Libraries) Act, 1954 for legal deposit; the Copyright Act, 1957 matters to conservators because photographing and publishing a work in copyright, and altering a work, engage the author's moral rights (section 57) — the right against distortion or mutilation. For a living artist's work, consult the artist before any restoration.
• GST: conservation services are taxable services; since 22 September 2025 the slabs are 5%, 18% and 40%. Rates for specific services change — confirm the current classification for restoration services before quoting, and remember that museum admission and some cultural services have had exemptions.
• Institutions: ASI Science Branch (chemical conservation of monuments and museum objects); National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural Property (NRLC), Lucknow with its regional centre at Mysuru — the apex research and training body; National Museum Institute, New Delhi (Master's and PhD in Conservation, a deemed university); INTACH conservation centres (Delhi, Lucknow and others) with its own art conservation training; IGNCA; the National Archives of India; CSMVS Mumbai (museum art conservation centre and a diploma programme); the National Mission on Manuscripts and the National Culture Fund; and conservation faculties at MS University Baroda, Aligarh Muslim University, Banaras Hindu University and the National Museum Institute.
• Entry routes for a BFA/BVA graduate: a Master's or PG diploma in art conservation (National Museum Institute, NRLC/affiliated, CSMVS, INTACH training); then posts as Conservation Assistant, Assistant Conservator, Conservator or Conservation Scientist in ASI, National Museum, NGMA, state museum departments, archives, university museums and private studios; recruitment is through UPSC and SSC for central posts and state PSCs for state museums. Private practice serves galleries, auction houses, corporate collections and insurers, and includes condition reporting for loans and courier work. A fine-arts background is a real advantage in retouching, modelling losses and reading an artist's technique; the chemistry is learned in the Master's.
• Fees and costing: quoted per object after examination — commonly as a day rate plus materials, not as a percentage of value. A conservator should not value the work they treat (a conflict of interest) and should carry professional indemnity cover where available.

Key points

• Conservation — all care of cultural property; restoration — the part that recovers lost appearance; restoration is a subset, not a synonym.
• Preventive conservation — controlling environment, pests, light and handling; protects the whole collection and is the cheapest intervention per object.
• Minimum intervention — do only what the object's stability and legibility require; "do nothing" is a legitimate treatment decision.
• Reversibility — every added material should be removable without harming the original; wax-resin lining and shellac at Ajanta are the classic failures of this rule.
• Distinguishability — new fills and inpainting must be identifiable on close inspection or under UV; *tratteggio* makes it visible by design.
• Agents of deterioration — ten: physical forces, theft/vandalism, fire, water, pests, pollutants, light/UV, wrong temperature, wrong RH, dissociation.
• RH band — about 45–60% is a common museum specification; stability matters more than the exact figure; over ~65% invites mould, under ~40% embrittles.
• Light limits — about 50 lux for paper, textile and watercolour; 150–200 lux for oil paintings; UV effectively removed; damage is cumulative and permanent.
• Lux-hour budget — illuminance × hours per year; the tool used to ration display time for sensitive works.
• IPM — inspection, housekeeping, exclusion and quarantine, with anoxia or freezing (about −20 to −30 °C) preferred over toxic fumigants.
• Examination order — visual and raking light, UV, IRR, X-ray, microscopy, then instrumental (XRF, FTIR, Raman, GC-MS); non-destructive before destructive.
• UV fluorescence — natural varnish glows greenish, retouches read dark; the fastest check for earlier restoration.
• Varnish removal — the highest-risk step in painting conservation because it is irreversible; always preceded by solvent tests in a discreet area.
• Inpainting rule — stay strictly within the loss, never over surviving original paint.
• Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972 — export of antiquities (generally 100 years old; 75 for certain manuscripts) is prohibited and trade is licensed by ASI.
• AMASR Act, 1958 / 2010 amendment — protects centrally notified monuments with a 100 m prohibited and further 200 m regulated area, administered with the National Monuments Authority.
• Moral rights, Copyright Act 1957 s.57 — an author can object to distortion or mutilation; for a living artist, get consent before restoring.
• Indian apex bodies — NRLC Lucknow (research and training), ASI Science Branch (monuments), National Museum Institute (degrees), INTACH and CSMVS (centres and training).

Formulas and examples

Example 1 — annual light dose and rotation of a watercolour. A gallery displays a watercolour at 50 lux, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week.

• Hours per year = 8 × 6 × 52 = 2,496 h.
• Dose = 50 × 2,496 = 124,800 lux-hours per year.
• If the institution's budget for very sensitive material is 50,000 lux-hours per year, the permissible display time = 50,000 ÷ 50 = 1,000 hours, i.e. 1,000 ÷ 8 = 125 days of display.
• So the sheet may be shown about 4 months a year and must then rest in dark storage — or the illuminance must be cut. At 30 lux the same 50,000 lux-hours allows 1,667 h ≈ 208 days.

Example 2 — reciprocity: brighter for less time. An oil painting is lit at 200 lux for 6 h/day, 300 days a year.

• Dose = 200 × 6 × 300 = 360,000 lux-hours/year.
• A curator wants 10 h/day for the same 300 days without increasing the dose: E₂ = 360,000 ÷ (10 × 300) = 120 lux.
• Note the limit of the calculation: reciprocity is an approximation. Some materials fade faster than dose alone predicts, so the lower illuminance is the safer choice even when the arithmetic matches.

Example 3 — mixing a consolidant and diluting it. A conservator needs 250 mL of 5% w/v acrylic resin in acetone.

• Solid required = 5 g per 100 mL × 2.5 = 12.5 g of resin, made up to 250 mL with acetone.
• Later, 100 mL of 2% w/v is wanted from the 5% stock: C₁V₁ = C₂V₂ → V₁ = (2 × 100) ÷ 5 = 40 mL of stock, plus 60 mL acetone.
• For 1 litre of 2% directly: 20 g resin in 1,000 mL.

Example 4 — inverse-square law for a display spotlight. A spotlight of 1,800 cd is aimed at a painting 3 m away.

• E = I/d² = 1,800 ÷ 3² = 200 lux — at the upper limit for an oil painting.
• Moving the lamp to 4 m: E = 1,800 ÷ 16 = 112.5 lux.
• To reach 150 lux: d = √(1,800 ÷ 150) = √12 ≈ 3.46 m.

Example 5 — costing a treatment. A private studio quotes for a 90 × 120 cm oil on canvas: examination and documentation 1 day, surface cleaning 3 days, varnish removal 6 days, tear repair and filling 3 days, inpainting 5 days, varnishing 1 day = 19 days. At a day rate of ₹4,000, labour = ₹76,000; materials (solvents, resins, Japanese tissue, stretcher work) ₹9,000; photography ₹3,000 → ₹88,000 before tax. Add GST at the rate applicable to the service (confirm the current classification) and transport and insurance, which are normally the owner's cost.

Where it is used

• Government conservation services: ASI Science Branch on monuments and murals (Ajanta, Ellora, Thanjavur, Hampi); NRLC Lucknow and its Mysuru centre for research, analysis and training; the National Archives for records and manuscripts.
• Museums and galleries: National Museum and NGMA New Delhi, CSMVS Mumbai, Indian Museum Kolkata, Salar Jung Hyderabad, state museums — conservation labs, condition reporting, loan courier work, and exhibition environmental design.
• Private studios and the art market: restoring modern Indian paintings for collectors, galleries and auction houses; pre-sale condition reports; post-flood and post-fire salvage; insurers and valuers rely on a conservator's report.
• Heritage and architectural conservation: INTACH chapters, Aga Khan Trust for Culture projects (Humayun's Tomb, Nizamuddin, Qutb Shahi tombs), state heritage cells, and conservation architects' teams where a materials conservator handles plaster, murals and stone.
• Religious and community collections: temple bronzes and processional icons, church paintings and altarpieces, gurdwara and monastery manuscripts and thangkas, palace and trust collections — often the largest unprotected body of material in India.
• Allied roles: collection manager and registrar, preventive conservation consultant for new museum builds, art handler and crating specialist, conservation photographer, and teaching posts in the conservation departments listed above.

Interview questions

• Q: What is the difference between conservation and restoration? A: Conservation covers everything done to safeguard an object — examination, documentation, preventive care and treatment; restoration is the specific intervention that recovers a lost or obscured appearance, such as filling and inpainting.
• Q: Why is reversibility a central principle? A: Because judgements and materials both age badly — today's fill or varnish may be judged wrong, or may itself degrade, so it must be removable without touching the original. Where true reversibility is impossible, the standard is re-treatability.
• Q: Which matters more, the right RH or a steady RH? A: A steady one. Cyclic swelling and shrinking causes cracking, cupping and panel splitting, so a stable value slightly off the ideal band is safer than a correct average that fluctuates.
• Q: A curator asks for 300 lux on a 19th-century watercolour. What do you say? A: Decline and explain: paper and dye-based media need about 50 lux, light damage is cumulative and irreversible, and I would offer a lux-hour budget with rotation or a facsimile for the longer display.
• Q: How do you tell an earlier restoration from original paint? A: UV fluorescence is the quick screen — aged natural varnish fluoresces greenish and retouches read dark; confirm with raking light, microscopy, X-radiography and, if needed, XRF showing a modern pigment such as titanium white in a work that predates it.
• Q: Why is varnish removal the most dangerous step? A: The solvent that swells the varnish can also swell the paint's binding medium and leach it, and once original paint is lost there is no recovery — so it demands tested solvent mixtures, discreet test patches and constant microscope checks.
• Q: What is tratteggio? A: A retouching technique using fine parallel hatched strokes that reads as the right colour at viewing distance but is plainly a restoration close up — it satisfies distinguishability, and is associated with Cesare Brandi and the Istituto Centrale del Restauro.
• Q: An owner wants an antique bronze restored and then exported. What is the legal position? A: Under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972, export of an antiquity — broadly an object over 100 years old — is prohibited, and trade is licensed; the object's status must be established with the ASI before any movement, and I would refuse to assist an export.
• Q: Why is conserving contemporary Indian art harder than conserving a 17th-century oil? A: The materials are unstable and often untested — acrylics that remain soft and solvent-sensitive, industrial paints, plastics, found objects and digital media — and the artist's intent may require ageing, replacement of parts or re-performance rather than material preservation; where the artist is living, the right first step is to interview them.
• Q: What is bronze disease and how is it treated? A: A cyclic, self-sustaining chloride corrosion of copper alloys showing as pale-green powdery spots; treatment removes the chloride mechanically and chemically, stabilises with a corrosion inhibitor such as benzotriazole, coats the surface, and then keeps the object in low, stable humidity.
• Q: Why is cement unsuitable for repairing historic stone or lime plaster? A: It is harder and less permeable than the original, so moisture and salts are forced into the historic material, and it releases soluble salts; a lime-based mortar matched to the original is weaker, breathable and removable.
• Q: You open a newly acquired painting and find live insects. What is your sequence? A: Isolate and quarantine it away from the collection immediately, identify the pest, treat by anoxia or freezing rather than fumigation, inspect and clean the crate and the receiving area, then check the storage environment that let it happen.
• Q: How does your BFA help in this career? A: It gives trained observation, colour matching, modelling and knowledge of how artists actually build a surface — the skills that make retouching and loss compensation credible; the chemistry and analytical side is added by a Master's at the National Museum Institute, NRLC or CSMVS.

Common mistakes

• Treating restoration as cosmetic improvement — "repainting" worn areas or going over original paint instead of staying strictly within the loss.
• Starting treatment before documenting; photographs taken only after work is done leave no record of what was original.
• Choosing a solvent or adhesive because it works today, without asking whether it can be removed in fifty years — the error behind shellac on the Ajanta murals and wax-resin lining of canvases.
• Quoting European RH and temperature figures as absolutes in exam answers; the examinable point is a stable band with mould above ~65% RH and embrittlement below ~40%, achievable in the local climate.
• Confusing illuminance (lux) with dose (lux-hours), so a "safe" lux level is allowed to run all year.
• Cleaning a watercolour or gouache with water, or using an aqueous method on a water-sensitive binder, because the technique was learned on oil paintings.
• Forgetting the law and the artist: moving an antiquity without checking its status under the 1972 Act, or restoring a living artist's work without consent, which engages moral rights under the Copyright Act, 1957.
• Over-cleaning to make a painting look "new" — patina, age-crack and original varnish residue are evidence, not dirt.

Related topics

Museum and heritage management · Art galleries, exhibitions and the art market · Fine arts careers: artist, illustrator, art teacher and curator · Painting materials, media and techniques · Indian art history: murals, miniatures and sculpture · Copyright, moral rights and the law for artists