Watercolour — Figure with a Serpent

Painted in a delicate, romantic idiom — a draped figure beside a forest pool, a serpent winding through the trees — this watercolour arrived with the paper support itself out of condition: warped and distorted, torn in places, with small areas where the paper had been lost outright, all beneath a settled layer of dust and grime.

Stabilising the support came first. Surface cleaning lifted the accumulated grime without disturbing the original media, and the warped sheet was gently humidified and flattened until it returned to plane — a slow, patient correction rather than a forced one.

With the paper stable, its tears were repaired using archival-quality conservation materials, and the losses were filled with hand-made paper pulp, carefully matched to the original sheet's thickness and texture so the repair reads as continuous with it. A final chromatic reintegration — reversible, conservation-grade colour applied only within the filled areas — brought the repairs visually into the composition, so the figure, the pool, and the coiling serpent read again as one continuous image.