The first image you see, below, is the original image as it appeared when Carol received it for restoration.
Slide the arrow to the right to reveal the image after Carol's amazing restoration work.
A client brought this more than 300 year old painting of her ancestor, Margaret Stuyvesant of the New York Stuyvesants, to Carol Hawkins Studio. The client hoped Carol could clean it without a hefty expenditure. Hawkins instead explained that she is not an art conservator. The layers of darkened varnish would be difficult for even a person with a masters degree in conservation to remove without damaging the underlying painting.
Carol can do very gentle cleaning and amazing reconstructions but she recommends that a valuable painting be taken to a conservator. Such work is quite expensive, however, and this client didn't have several hundred dollars to spend. She simply wanted to get an idea of what her ancestor looked like.
So Carol scanned the image and produced this amazing image by "forensic" manipulation of the scan. Seeing a lot more amazing details therein she would have liked to have been able to "clean it up" a lot more but everyone has a budget and Hawkins works with each client to stay within their budget.