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The Art Conservation Project

The Art Conservation Project preserves cultural treasures from around the world and highlights the crucial need for their protection.

Works of art can provide a lasting reflection of people and their cultures, but they are subject to deterioration over time. The Bank of America Art Conservation Project is a unique program that provides grants to nonprofit museums throughout the world to conserve historically or culturally significant works of art that are in danger of degeneration, including works that have been designated as national treasures.

Since 2010, Bank of America has provided grants to museums in 25 countries for 57 conservation projects through the global Art Conservation Project. In 2012, the program supported the restoration of a diverse range of works, including Picasso’s Woman Ironing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tintoretto’s Paradise at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; the reassembly and preservation of the illuminated manuscripts of the Anvar-I Suhayli at the CSMVS Museum, Mumbai; and five paintings by Marc Chagall at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

In 2013, the Art Conservation Project has expanded once again to include 24 unique projects in sixteen countries, including three iconic paintings by Jackson Pollock—Number 1A, 1948; One: Number 31, 1950; and Echo: Number 25, 1951—at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Watts Towers of Simon Rodia, at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Rembrandt’s Scholar in His Study at the National Gallery in Prague; photographs from the personal collection of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at La Casa Azul (The Blue House) at the Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City; and stone sculptures from the second century to the nineteenth century at the Beijing Stone Carving Art Museum.

View the progress on The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife at the National Gallery of Ireland.

Photo © National Gallery of Ireland

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View the conservation of historical portraits by Gilbert Stuart at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

New Bedford Free Public Library
New Bedford, Massachusetts
Albert Bierstadt
(American, b. Germany, 1830–1902)

Three paintings

Sunset Light, Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains, 1861
Oil on canvas
38” x 59” (96.5 x 149.8 cm)
Gift of Eliza Dana
 
Salt Lick in Sunset Glow, c. 1886
Oil on canvas
40-1/2" x 49-1/2" (102.8 x 125.7 cm)

Mount Sir Donald, 1889
Oil on canvas
105” x 80” (266.7 x 203.2 cm)

The three paintings by Albert Bierstadt to be treated through The Art Conservation Project are important to America’s cultural heritage and to the southeastern Massachusetts community. 


Bierstadt’s canvases played a key role in mythologizing the American West and in shaping America’s self-image. The examples held by the New Bedford Free Public Library cover the time span from Bierstadt’s peak in the 1860s to his late work dating from the artist’s last trip west in 1889. Sunset Light is recognized as the precursor to one of Bierstadt’s most famous canvases, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak,1863. Several elements in Sunset Light were incorporated into the later painting, and typify the dynamic experience of nature Bierstadt sought to convey through dramatic lighting, meticulous detail, grandeur of scale and metaphoric power. Salt Lick in Sunset Glow, a depiction of buffalo at the Platte River in Nebraska, and Mount Sir Donald, created when Bierstadt’s artistic reputation was in decline, demonstrate the artist’s allegiance to the kind of heroic style that by the 1870s had been overshadowed by French Impressionism.

Bierstadt’s work is also tied to the greater New Bedford community in which he grew up and where he began his career as a painter in 1850. In November 1857 he exhibited his paintings at the newly opened New Bedford Free Public Library, prompting a local critic to write, “As an artist who has faithfully studied his favorite art, and has settled among us to prosecute it, Mr. Bierstadt is worthy of the patronage of our citizens and we hope will meet with liberal encouragement.” One of the founders of the New Bedford Art Association, Bierstadt mounted its first exhibit there in July 1858.

All three paintings are in vital need of treatment to stabilize tearing of the embrittled canvases and remove layers of yellowed synthetic varnish. Their obvious states of deterioration do not reflect Bierstadt’s intention and give the public a distorted view of his work (both literally and figuratively). After conservation treatment of the three works, they will be displayed in the library’s Art Room and featured in future collaborative exhibitions now under discussion with such organizations as the New Bedford Art Museum and the National Park Service.

To read more about recipients, click here. 

If you have questions, click here.

Sunset Light, Wind River
Range of the Rocky Mountains
1861, Oil on canvas
38” x 59” (96.5 x 149.8 cm)
Gift of Eliza Dana

Header image:
Queen Elizabeth I (Armada Portrait),
c. 1588
Unknown English artist
Oil on panel, 38-1/2" × 28-1/2"