Caring for paintings at home

Dust, light, humidity and the two moments to ask a conservator.

A well-made painting is a long-lived object. Given clean air, steady humidity and light that is neither harsh nor accidental, an oil or acrylic will still look as it did in the studio a hundred years from now. The care it needs is quiet and mostly about avoiding the wrong things.

Dust with a clean, dry, natural-hair brush every few months, working from the top down. A soft goat-hair or squirrel brush costs a pound or two at an art shop and lasts a decade. Never use a duster with fibres that can catch on impasto, never a damp cloth, and never any spray polish, glass cleaner, wet wipe, alcohol or vinegar. Water and cleaning products are the two most common causes of avoidable damage to paintings at home; they dissolve pigment, lift varnish and leave rings that a conservator has to reverse.

The frame is a different job. Wooden frames can be dusted with a soft, dry cloth, and their corners with a brush. Gilded frames are fragile and should only be brushed; a fingertip on gilding leaves an oily mark that darkens over time. Glass on a framed work on paper takes a very slightly damp microfibre cloth, sprayed on the cloth, never on the glass, so nothing runs down into the frame.

Steady conditions matter more than perfect ones. A house that lives between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius and 45 to 55 percent relative humidity is comfortable for people and for paintings. The enemies are sudden changes: a bathroom-hot room in winter and a cold room in summer, a wet spring after a dry winter, a fireplace lit for an evening every few days. Canvas and wood expand and contract with humidity, and the paint film has to move with them. Rapid movement is what causes flaking and craquelure. If the room where a painting lives has a woodburner or an open fire, place the work on the far side of the room from the heat source, and keep an eye on the humidity through a five-pound hygrometer from a hardware shop.

Direct sunlight is the slower thief. Most pigments fade under ultraviolet light; blues shift towards grey, reds thin out, and darks lose their depth. A wall that catches an hour of direct sun a day will visibly lighten an unvarnished painting over a decade. Two solutions work: hang the painting outside the sunbeam, or fit a UV-filtering film to the window. Modern films are almost invisible on the glass and stop about 99 percent of UV without changing the colour of the light indoors. For a framed work on paper or a signed print, glazing with museum-grade anti-reflective UV glass is the right long-term answer.

Handle a painting by the frame, never by the canvas. Fingers on canvas leave oil that darkens; a thumb on impasto can crack the crest of a brushstroke. When you move a painting, take it off the wall two-handed, keep the picture face towards you, and set it down on a soft surface, corner-first, never flat on its front. If you are transporting the work, stand it on its long edge in a car footwell with a blanket around it, not flat in a boot where anything can slide onto its face.

Two moments deserve a professional conservator, not a broom-cupboard fix. The first is any new sign of change in the paint film: a fresh crack you had not seen, a raised flake, a matte patch where varnish has failed, or bloom (a milky haze) that has appeared over months. The second is after any accident: a leak, a fire, smoke, a fall. Do not test cleaners, spirits or heat on the picture; leave it as it is and photograph the damage in good daylight. A conservator’s first visit and written opinion often cost less than a home repair that has to be undone. The Institute of Conservation (icon.org.uk) keeps a searchable directory of accredited members in the United Kingdom.

Michael, for the studio