Senior Collections Conservator (Fine Art)

Rachel Turnbull is a fine art conservator working for English Heritage. English Heritage is a registered charity and is one of the most important guardians of historic sites in England. English Heritage cares for over 400 historic buildings, monuments and sites spanning over 6,000 years of history.

Responsibilities

1. Conserving paintings, making them stable and aesthetically improving their look through cleaning.
2. Auditing and checking the condition and stability of the collection. This involves viewing every one of our 1300 paintings once every four years and assessing damage and potential causes of that damage as well as future risks.
3. Carrying out technical examination of paintings to establish their age and attribution, or to find out more about how they were made. This can lead to exciting new findings, like hidden images beneath what you can see today, or to confirming who painted something.

As a fine art conservator, I care for and treat paintings, usually those in oil paint on canvas or wooden panel supports. It requires a highly diverse range of knowledge and skills: structural work to canvas or wood (knowledge of a material\’s mechanical response to its environment); cleaning surface dirt or old resin varnish with aqueous methods or solvents (knowledge of chemistry); retouching losses to the original paint (manual dexterity, good colour vision); understanding technical findings (knowledge of art history); refitting paintings in frames (carpentry skills); understanding the causes of degradation in paintings (amongst others, knowledge of the response of paintings to temperature, relative humidity and light).

As a cluster manager, I have overall responsibility for five properties within the English Heritage charity. My work helps to…

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