Caroline Hampton

Head of Oil Painting and Frame Conservation

I care for and carry out conservation work on the Museum’s collection of oil paintings and frames. The Museum owns over 4500 oil paintings.

The Museum has a busy schedule of changing displays and hanging paintings in new galleries. The paintings are also borrowed by other institutions and travel widely in this country and overseas.

The work I do involves the practical conservation of oil paintings. I spend most of my working day at an easel. I might be cleaning a painting, which means removing surface dirt or discoloured varnish layers. And I often spend many hours carefully retouching tiny paint losses using a very small brush. The treatment of some paintings can take more than a hundred hours.

After treatment the painting looks as it did when the artist first painted it, the colours are fresh and any damages have ‘disappeared’.

My favourite thing about painting conservation

I enjoy discovering changes in the painting that the artist themselves made. For example, a few years ago I conserved a painting by Henry James Pidding depicting a group of Greenwich Hospital naval pensioners outside the chapel.

The subject was important but the painting was very dark and in rather poor condition because of the technique and materials the artist had used. The paint layers had a very noticeable cracking pattern which looked like crocodile skin.

An x-radiograph showed that originally the picture included two milkmaids where three men now stand. They had been painted out. Further research revealed that the artist had initially wanted to paint a picture with lots of hidden messages to do with lust and regret but had changed his mind.