The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has been haunted for decades by one of the art world’s most dramatic mysteries, and a less significant but still significant case was solved when conservators discovered the original fabric of a set of chairs in need of restoration in the museum’s Dutch Room (the site of one of the largest art thefts ever).
The mystery stems from a still-unsolved case: three precious paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt and Manet were stolen by thieves who broke into the Dutch Room in 1990 and took with them the unaccounted for art. The new mystery involves the question of how best to reupholster a set of 17th-century chairs to be true to the era as part of a three-year restoration of the Holland Room.
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According to Boston radio station WBUR, “Most of its restoration has been relatively simple tasks, such as cleaning the Italian-painted ceiling and repainting the floors. But this set of 14 chairs posed a unique challenge. They had been reupholstered so many times over the years that the old fabrics had been lost.”
Anna Rose Keefe, the Gardner Museum’s textile conservator, keeps archival photos and fabric samples on bulletin boards, much like the stuff that down-and-out police investigators would stare at as they search for inferences and connections. “A lot of the visuals surrounding this feel very law and order For me,” she told WBUR.
“In a project like this, we try to really think about what she wanted us to see,” said conservation director Holly Salmon Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museum’s founder.
For its part, the chairs feature a striped patterned upholstery, unlike the fabric that has covered them since the 1970s. But the original color wasn’t evident in the black-and-white photos, so conservators turned to Palette, an artificial intelligence software platform that can colorize old photos. This discovery, coupled with the discovery of a small section of faded thread, confirmed the suspicion that the chair was originally red, with streaks of pink scattered throughout.
Now, the chair has been reupholstered to make it more dynamic. Textiles conservator Keefe said, again of Gardner herself, “She loved silks that were really shiny. She loved things that would really pop in the space.”
As for the rest of the Holland Room, this is where Rembrandt Self-portrait, age 23The restoration is expected to be completed in early 2027, at which time, according to the Gardner website, “the young Rembrandt will look out over a beautifully restored room, closer to Isabella’s original vision, and ready to welcome the stolen works one day back to (we hope and believe) their rightful home.”
