Art Restoration and Conservation Editing and Proofreading Services

An owner brings in a painting and asks for it to be cleaned. What they picture is the varnish coming off and the colours appearing. What may actually be under there is a nineteenth-century repaint over an area of loss, an old lining that is holding the canvas together, and a decision about whether to reveal damage the last three owners chose not to see. None of that is a technical question until somebody has written it down.

We edit what conservators and restoration studios produce — condition reports and treatment proposals, treatment records and completion reports, examination and analysis documentation, estimates and client agreements, collection care and environmental guidance, grant applications for conservation projects, tender responses for institutional work, and the correspondence that manages an owner's expectations. Our editors work on documents that record an irreversible decision.

The treatment proposal is the document that gets consent and the document that will be read if anything goes wrong, and its failure is a plan describing what will be done without describing what will not. Conservation is defined by restraint, and restraint has to be visible on the page. We work through these so the condition is separated from the proposal, since an owner needs to know what the object is before hearing what is planned for it; so each proposed intervention states its purpose, the materials, and whether it is reversible, because reversibility is the profession's central commitment and is meaningless unspoken; so the options are given as a range with their consequences — minimum intervention, a middle course, and full restoration — rather than a single recommendation, given that this is the owner's decision and not the conservator's; so what will not be done is stated explicitly, as an owner expecting a repaint removed and receiving a stabilised surface has been failed by the proposal rather than by the work; so the uncertainties are named with the point at which the owner will be consulted again, since cleaning tests reveal things and a proposal that cannot pause is a proposal that will be exceeded; so documentation, photography and the record that will accompany the object are described; and so the estimate is tied to the scope with what changes it. Proposals written this way protect the object and the studio.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including condition reports, client information and material relating to collections. We are editors rather than conservators, and we offer no view on condition, treatment, materials or the care of any object. What we can do is make the restraint in your proposal visible.