Restoration

Whistler’s famed Peacock Room, ‘vibrant and revamped’, reopens following major conservation project

The historic interior, with its elaborate avian ornamentation, has undergone months of cleaning and restoration to shore up worn elements and return others to their original lustre

‘Unexhibitable’ Eva Hesse sculpture will go on view at New York's Guggenheim following restoration

A new exhibition at the museum centres on ‘Expanded Expansion’, a large-scale latex work that had deteriorated in storage for decades

William Beckford’s tower is finally complete, 200 years after the eccentric English architect started construction

The Bath museum, the only surviving example of the reclusive millionaire's architectural achievements, is also showing works from his original art collection

Woman's selfie mishap damages work at Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum

Meanwhile, Mick Jagger's photo in front of Picasso's Guernica makes waves

Ilya Repin's chilling painting of Ivan the Terrible—vandalised in 2018 by a drunk man with a metal pole—goes back on show at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery

The work was temporarily rehung for press, but the public will have to wait until a bulletproof "protective capsule" can be installed

Historic English villa—built by royal mistress to escape her 'stinker' of a husband—reopens after restoration

Henrietta Howard's Marble Hill is a rare surviving example of such a home, and even rarer as one created by a woman

Mosulnews

‘Living history’: meet the Mosul residents rebuilding their city

Local trainees are taking up traditional stone masonry techniques as part of a major Unesco initiative to restore heritage houses damaged in the battle to liberate the Iraqi city from Isis

Unesco’s winning designs for Mosul mosque are redrawn

An international restoration plan has been revised after the foundations of an ancient prayer hall were discovered at the site of the Al-Nuri mosque

Versailles restores Royal Tennis Court—where French democracy was founded—to its former glory

Modern-day politicians in France's National Assembly helped to crowdfund the €1.8m restoration at the Château de Versailles

William Morris's 'heaven on earth' home in the Cotswolds reopens after restoration

New research has helped to bring back lost objects and features at Kelmscott Manor, where the English Arts and Crafts designer lived for 25 years

Babylon is coming back to life, with its famed Ishtar Gate to be restored by this summer

A new World Monuments Fund project in conjunction with the US embassy in Baghdad aims to repair Iraqi cultural heritage as part of the Future of Babylon project

Venetian renaissance: palazzo and studio of Mariano Fortuny reopens as house-museum after flood damage

The Museo Fortuny has now been restored as a permanent venue celebrating the polymath designer's life and work

The British Museum says it needs another £1bn to refurbish itself—first it must prove it deserves it

It's time to drag the institution out of its entrenched past and into the 21st century

Iraqnews

Sculptures vandalised by Isis return to ancient city of Hatra after restoration

Artefacts had been "smashed into pieces" by Isis militants when they occupied the Unesco World Heritage site as a training camp

How did the only painting sold by Van Gogh in his lifetime end up in Russia?

Revelations about The Red Vineyard, just conserved at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum

a blog by Martin Bailey

Historic Peruvian church to be restored after earthquake

The Church of La Jalca Grande, one of the first churches built in Peru after the Spanish conquest, was constructed using stones from pre-Hispanic monuments

True mettle: restoring Hampton Court Palace's glorious but scarred Baroque iron screens

Reviving 17th-century Tijou screens commissioned by Protestant monarchs William and Mary means undoing decades of damage and haphazard repairs

Catholic church's proposed redesign of Notre Dame interior provokes outrage

Plans to revamp the fire-ravaged cathedral with contemporary art and multilingual projections of Bible quotes have been compared to Disneyland

Restoration of Courtauld Gallery's Botticelli altarpiece yields surprising new discoveries

Technical studies on neglected painting cast valuable light on the workings of the Renaissance master's Florence studio and on the question of attribution

Ancient Krishnas are reunited with their body parts

A collaboration between the Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Museum of Cambodia revealed that each boy god had been given the other’s limbs during earlier conservation work

Hubert van Eyck, Jan’s older brother, painted parts of the Ghent Altarpiece

New research indicates Hubert started the work but had to stop, so Jan took over

A sneak peek at France's first cultural venue celebrating stained glass

The Cité du Vitrail will open in the medieval town of Troyes in spring 2022, but preview tours are running this weekend for the European Heritage Days

First Cupid, now a wine glass? More revelations emerge from restored Vermeer painting in Dresden

Major restoration on Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window shows a large studded goblet later covered by a green curtain

Secrets and lies: the role of restorers in art crime

Regulation of the conservation profession may be a start, but can it quash the “ego” that often motivates restorers-turned-forgers?

Manet of the Valleys: portrait of the artist's bespectacled cousin to be restored by National Museum Wales

Painting will undergo extensive technical examination and cleaning thanks to €20,000 grant from Tefaf fund

A year on from the devastating Beirut blast, the city’s national museum slowly reopens

Louvre specialists worked with Lebanese counterparts to repair the damaged building

Eccentric Wentworth Woodhouse estate—home to centuries-old camellias—gets set to bloom again in Yorkshire

The rambling 365-room mansion is being rescued from near collapse, starting with its tea house

British Museum to restore glass artefacts shattered in Beirut explosion

Eight vessels from the Archaeological Museum of the American University of Beirut will undergo conservation thanks to €25,000 grant from Tefaf fund

Nailed it: Kizhi Pogost church is finally restored on Russian island of remarkable wooden buildings

Newly reopened 18th-century Church of the Transfiguration, topped with 22 domes, is said to have been built without a single nail