Last week I sat down with Paul Haner, paintings conservator for the Saint Louis Art Museum, and asked him a few questions about being a conservator and Restoring an American Treasure.

Paul Haner and Janeen Turk, senior curatorial assistant, examining the Panorama.

Catherine Wood: What is your favorite thing about being a conservator?

Paul Haner: The hands-on treatment. In a museum we do lots of other things, but the hands-on treatment is the most fun.

CW: What other kinds of things do you work on?

PH: We do research, comparing artworks to one another for condition. Some of what we work on in conservation are paintings that are three, four, five hundred years old. With those, mostly what we’re doing is dealing with previous restoration – maybe the materials they used are not holding up any more, or they’ve changed color, or the painting has developed some kind of problem related to an earlier treatment. We have to take things apart and redo them, put them back together.
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