Reframing an Inherited Painting: What to Keep, What to Replace

An inherited painting usually arrives with a frame that is somewhere between charming and actively harmful, and those two are not mutually exclusive. A beautiful old frame very often contains exactly the materials that are damaging the work inside it.

The good news is that this splits cleanly. Keep the frame. Replace what is inside it.

Signs it needs opening now

• A brown line around the edge of the image, following the shape of the mat. That is acid burn, and it is happening continuously.
• Yellowing or brittleness in the paper, especially at the edges.
• Waviness or cockling. The sheet is restrained and cannot move.
• Any tape visible at the edges or corners.
• Fogging or bloom on the inside of the glass. Moisture is getting in.
• Grey or brown speckling, which is mould.
• The artwork touching the glass with no mat or spacer between them.
• Corrugated cardboard as the backing.

Keep the frame

Old mouldings are frequently better made than new ones and often cannot be reproduced. Worn gilding with red bole showing through where the gold has rubbed away is desirable, not damage. Resist the urge to touch it up: a patched repair looks far worse than honest wear.

What does need attention is structural. Loose corner joints should be re-secured, and any nails driven into the rebate come out.

Keep everything written on the back

This is the part people throw away, and it is often the part that matters most.

Labels, exhibition stickers, inscriptions, dealer marks, old framer's labels: these are the painting's history and they can matter a great deal to its provenance. Never clean, peel, or tidy the back of an old painting before someone has looked at it.

We photograph the back before doing anything, and where possible the label itself is kept with the piece rather than discarded.

Replace what is touching the artwork

• All board, mat and backing both, to conservation grade.
• All tape and adhesive, replaced with reversible hinges.
• The glazing, usually. Old glass has no UV filtering, and a piece already damaged by light should not be given another few decades of it.
• The hardware. Old wire fatigues and old screws loosen. Cheapest part of the job, and the one that prevents the worst outcome.
• The dust seal.

The one thing that cannot be undone

If the work has been dry mounted or glued to a board, that is permanent. The sheet is bonded to its mount, and separating them is specialist conservation work that is expensive, risky, and sometimes impossible.

It is not a reason to despair. A dry-mounted piece can still be reframed properly and will still last, and the mount at least keeps it flat. But it does affect the value of an original, and it is better to know than to find out later.

It is also why we will not dry mount anything, whatever it would cost us in an argument.

Framing is not conservation

These are different trades and it is worth being clear about the line. Flaking paint, tears, water damage, discoloured varnish, and mould in the fibres are a conservator's work, not a framer's. We will say so rather than attempt it. What we can do is stabilise the housing so nothing gets worse while you decide what to do.

How we handle it

We open it and look before quoting anything, because until the back is off nobody knows what is in there. Then we tell you what we found, including when the answer is that it is fine and needs nothing, which happens more often than you might expect. If we find something that changes the job, we stop and talk to you before going further.

Opening a frame to look is a short job and it is the only way to answer the question. If you are in Vancouver, bring it to the gallery at 1242 Davie Street, open seven days.

More in reframing an old or inherited painting, acid-free mats and backing, and our conservation framing standards.

We frame original work in-house, including a great deal that was framed badly by somebody else first.