Updated March 4, 2026 at 2:16 PM EST
Anna Rose Keefe, the textiles conservator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, keeps two bulletin boards in the museum’s conservation lab. They are covered in fabric samples and archival photos, a collage of images that makes little sense to anyone but the hard-boiled detective who put them there. The only thing missing is some red string.
“A lot of the visuals around this feel very ‘Law and Order’ to me,” Keefe quipped on a recent February morning.
Standing in the lab, an airy room with the shades drawn against the sun, she recalled the puzzle that has consumed her for the last two years: how to restore a set of 17th-century gilt chairs whose original upholstery was long gone.
“My perfect vision would be that the fabric had been hiding underneath the show cover,” Keefe said. “That is not what happened.”
Admittedly, it was a very conservator-specific mystery. The project was part of a three-year-long restoration of the Gardner’s Dutch Room, which will soon be complete. The Dutch Room is best known as the site where thieves cut paintings from their frames and made off with other valuable objects in the 1990 Gardner Museum heist. Much of its restoration has consisted of relatively straightforward tasks, like cleaning the painted Italian ceiling and refinishing the floors. But the set of 14 chairs posed a unique challenge. They had been reupholstered multiple times over the years, and the old fabric was lost.
An ordinary conservator might not see this as a problem. But the Gardner Museum’s conservation team needed to restore the chairs to precisely how they looked in the early 1900s, part of their ongoing, rather quixotic remit to realize the vision of the museum’s founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner.
“ In a project like this, we try to really think about what she intended us to see,” said Holly Salmon, the museum’s director of conservation.
That’s because Gardner not only built a museum in which to house her vast art collection, but arranged it all to her specific taste. She lived in an apartment on the fourth floor and threw parties in the galleries, surrounded by priceless works of art. When she died in 1924, she stated in her will that future generations could not change the “general disposition” of the galleries. Subsequent generations of conservators have interpreted her will in various ways.
“She did put in her will that she wanted the people that followed her to care for the museum,” Salmon said. “But not being specific about that, you could interpret it as, ‘The wall upholstery is falling apart. It looks terrible. We need to replace it.’”
Which brings us back to the chairs. Since the 1970s, they have been covered in a tasteful peach damask, the kind of floral pattern you might find on your grandmother’s curtains.
Photos of the chairs from 1926 showed them in various states of repair. The team zeroed in on a fabric with vertical ombre stripes that was also pictured in earlier photos. Some of the striped chairs looked particularly tattered, suggesting Gardner favored that pattern.
“ Well that’s all fine and dandy, but what color were they?” said Kathleen King, the Gardner’s registrar.
The museum’s archives provided a clue. There, King discovered letters from patrons – essentially, fan mail – describing the Dutch room. One made mention of “dull red furniture.” Another described a visit to the Dutch room in breathlessly descriptive terms: “ I just sat and sat in that beautiful green room with all the little colored rose happenings on the ceiling and the pink in the chairs catching the color, too.”
But the letters only referred to “chairs,” not “a set of 14 gilt side chairs from the 1600s.”
“ We just came back to the photographs and were like, ‘we have to figure out what these photos are trying to tell us,’” King said.
Luckily, the archives also contained the original glass plate negatives of the photos. The staff collection photographer used them to create high resolution images, which she then ran through an AI software called Palette, which colorizes historic photos.
It was a bit of a gamble – after all, neither AI nor a color scientist can claim to be 100% accurate when colorizing black-and-white images. Palette describes its technology as making “sophisticated, data-driven guesses.” And indeed, some photos of the famously green Dutch room came out inexplicably orange.
“But a couple of them were rather spot on,” King said.
She pointed to the edges of one picture of the chairs, where a yellow and red tapestry was visible.
“Those tapestries still hang in that gallery today, and we know what they look like,” she explained. “We know what colors they are, and so we can compare the colors in the tapestries to the colors in the chairs, and come up with a really close approximation of what the original color as of 1926 would’ve been.”
In other words, the software correctly guessed the colors of the tapestry, so it seemed likely it was correct about the chairs. What’s more, the software backed up what was written in the letters: the chairs were probably red.
Still, the team wanted hard evidence to be sure.
“ We were operating with a ton of information behind us, but you always sort of wonder, will there be hard evidence that comes out and it’ll be something I didn’t expect,” Keefe said.
After stripping one of the chairs down to the frame, she finally found it: a tiny piece of faded red thread.
”I was super relieved,” Keefe said, recalling the moment.
The result of this investigation stood before us in the lab: a vibrant red and pink striped chair that reminded me of a candy cane. It was brighter and more modern-looking than I expected. Keefe assured me that it was in keeping with the styles of that era, designed by a French company that specializes in historic fabrics and had painstakingly reproduced the exact proportions of the stripes.
We headed downstairs to the Dutch room. A staff conservator stood on some scaffolding in the center of the hall, cleaning the carvings in the ceiling. Candelabra-style wall sconces cast weak light onto the sage green walls, where two huge picture frames hung empty, robbed of their paintings in the infamous heist. A few of the newly reupholstered chairs stood against one wall, jewel-like amid earth tones of brown and green.
“When we first saw them in this room, we had them over in this shadowy corner, kind of by one of the doors,” Keefe said. “ And they were under real raking light, which gave them a glowy quality.”
The discovery brought her closer to Isabella, which is what the conservators call Gardner, as if she’s an old friend.
“She likes a silk that’s really shiny,” Keefe said. “She likes something that’s really going to pop in the space.”
Ever since landing on the color red, the team noticed the color everywhere. Though the overwhelming effect of the Dutch room is green, many of the paintings feature red chairs.
“Mary Tudor sits on a red chair,” Keefe said. “The doctor of law leans his arm on a red chair.”
Even one of the Rembrandts that was stolen from the Dutch room, “A Lady And Gentleman In Black,” contained a chair with a red cushion on it.
“Once we landed on this color, it started to make sense,” Keefe said. “Like, of course they’re red. Of course they are. Everything else is.”
Standing in the gallery, it was possible to imagine how Isabella saw it: the green walls shimmering in low candle light and the red striped chairs glowing in the shadows like embers, all part of her grand design.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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