english | français

In the last year and a half a great deal of attention has been devoted to the condition of the paintings in the collection. Many pictures have been cleaned and, where necessary, restored. This has revealed a lot of information about technique and provided the comforting reassurance that the majority of the paintings are very well preserved indeed. Many works benefited from the attention to detail and the gentle cleaning. A few, like the Pieter Lastman, Moyses van Wttenbrouck, Pieter Post, Pieter Saenredam, Emmanuel de Witte, Roelant Roghman, Nicolaes Maes, Jan van de Velde, Willem van Herp and Lodewijk de Vadder, have been restored more profoundly – some by Sarah Walden in London and the majority by Regina da Costa Pinto Dias Moreira in Paris, to both of whom we are much obliged. For those of us who live with the paintings on a daily basis, this enterprise has been exciting and revealing and we hope that visitors to the exhibition and to this website will also be impressed by the freshness of many of the pictures.

The frames that house the paintings were also the subject of close scrutiny, and many of them have been restored, too. We also reconsidered the framing as such. We searched the large collection of frames at the Fondation Custodia for other options, and this resulted in a number of happy marriages, while at the same time we acquired from elsewhere – and to great effect – wonderful examples dating from the times and places the pictures were made. The governing principle was to do justice to the works of art and present them in an authentic way. Here you can see some of the works in their former and present – antique – ‘surrounds’ and a number of pictures that have been newly ‘fitted up’, to make viewers aware of the tremendous difference a frame can make.