Conservation and Restoration
The rich and very diverse War Heritage Institute collection is to be admired both in the Royal Military Museum galleries and in its other sites. A large part of the collection is however not available to the public, as it is kept in storage. Safeguarding the objects for future generations, that is one of the institution’s core tasks.
No collection piece is immune to decay: armours, tanks, planes, uniforms or paintings are all subjected to the workings of time. Each and every material ages and declines, visibly or invisibly, as time goes by.
The restoration workshops
The Royal Military Museum maintains several restoration workshops, handling the objects’ physical decay. There are workshops for textile, paintings, metal, fire-arms, paper and leather, but the Museum also has the necessary know-how to restore ships, airplanes and tanks.
The physical condition of our collections is maintained through both conservation and restoration. Conservation stabilizes or curbs degradation, whereas restoration gives a collection item a new lease of life.