How to Fix a Flaking Gainsborough

May 18 2021

Picture: Holkham Hall

Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:

Katherine Hardwick, collections coordinator at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, has penned a blog describing recent conservation work to Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of Thomas William Coke ‘of Norfolk’. Alas, the portrait was found to be suffering from serious 'flaking' ten years ago. A campaign of restoration undertaken in 2011 had since failed to fix the problem. During the past months conservators from the Hamilton Kerr Institute have had another go at fixing the problem with special techniques using glue. The newly restored painting has been rehung in the South Dining Room and will be on display for visitors.

Share This
- Conservation

Notice to "Internet Explorer" Users

You are seeing this notice because you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 (or older version). IE6 is now a deprecated browser which this website no longer supports. To view the Art History News website, you can easily do so by downloading one of the following, freely available browsers:

Internet Explorer 8.0 (for XP and Vista Users)
Internet Explorer 9.0 (for Windows 7 Users Only)
Mozilla Firefox (Latest Version, for Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7)
Google Chrome (Latest Version, for Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7)

Once you have upgraded your browser, you can return to this page using the new application, whereupon this notice will have been replaced by the full website and its content.