Tapestry conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1872 and by the early twentieth century it was building its outstanding collection of western European tapestries. Today, this collection, now numbering over 400 pieces, contains a wide array of important tapestries from different periods and workshops, ranging from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The subject of this chapter is how the Metropolitan’s Department of Textile Conservation, created in 1967, cares for this collection, and what principles subsist behind the various treatments employed.