Fellows
Meet the Fellows of the Department of Paintings Conservation
2023-2024 Fellows
Derek Lintala is a recent graduate of the Kress Program in Paintings Conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He completed his capstone internship in the Painting Conservation Department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. During his coursework, Derek served as an extern in the frame conservation studio at the Met and worked as a lab assistant in the Department of Scientific Research at Sotheby’s auction house. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a fine art and antique packing technician for several years. He completed his undergraduate studies in Art History and Studio Art at Boston College. Throughout his undergraduate years, he interned in the Conservation Department at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Treatment and Technical Study of Two Tritons at the Feast of Acheloüs
As the 2023-2024 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, Derek is studying and restoring the painting Two Tritons at the Feast of Acheloüs (06.1039). The painting was acquired by the Met 1906 and, since entering the collection, has never undergone conservation treatment. Initially thought to be the work of Peter Paul Rubens, much debate over the attribution occurred during the following century, with a young Anthony van Dyck included among its possible creators. Currently, the painting is assigned to Cornelis de Vos and Frans Snyders, who were regular collaborators of Rubens. This attribution derives from the painting Fish Market in the collection of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, a documented collaboration by de Vos and Snyders that depicts the same model. Through the work’s cleaning, restoration, and analysis, Derek hopes to shed further light onto the painting’s attribution.
Past Fellows
During his first year as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, Derek’s primary research focused on the conservation treatment and technical study of John Hoppner’s full-length portrait of Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan and her Son, Charles (65.203) in preparation for the painting’s reinstallation in the European Paintings galleries. In addition to a dramatic cleaning which made visible the artist’s original handling of color and paint texture, various technical imaging methods were used to show that Hoppner made many alterations to the painting as he worked. Alongside this project, Derek conducted other conservation treatments of paintings and frames relating to the reopening of the European Paintings galleries.
Sara Kornhauser was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservation Fellowship. She worked primarily on paintings in the Modern and Contemporary Art collection. Her main fellowship project was the research and treatment of Nijinsky, 1950, by Franz Kline, which is a complex composition painted on a reused canvas. For this project, Sara developed and carried out a treatment to reverse a past, unsuccessful restoration campaign done in the 1960s.
Kristin Holder was awarded a Met-Getty Research Scholarship in Paintings Conservation. She focused mostly on the structural conservation of panel paintings but also had opportunities to work on large paintings on canvas and to perform minor frame treatments. The complex treatment of a large gold ground painting from a sixteenth-century Sienese altarpiece utilized recent techniques and materials in the structural conservation of panel paintings. Kristin’s technical study of wooden supports helped to inform panel paintings being studied and treated in the studio, and her interest in evidence of hardware in painting resulted in a paper that will be published in the Proceedings from the 2022 Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference.