AI Uncovers Lost Details in a 138-Year-Old Painting by William Merritt Chase

The latest:

A newly restored William Merritt Chase painting goes on public display this week after conservators used artificial intelligence to identify details lost to earlier restoration work. A Comfortable Corner, painted around 1888 and held by the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, enters the exhibition William Merritt Chase and Walter Granville-Smith: American Impressionists of the East End, running 14 November to 21 March 2027.

Details:

• The painting: A Comfortable Corner depicts a woman reclining in a furnished interior, wearing a deep blue kimono and holding an uchiwa fan. Kaitlin Halloran, the museum’s associate curator, described the work as important within Chase’s output because it captures a moment of Japanese influence on 19th-century art and on the artist’s own practice.
• The interventions: At least two restorations substantially changed the painting’s appearance, according to The Art Newspaper, including a major effort in the 1960s. The work was given a heavyweight, almost burlap-like lining, retouching and blotchy inpainting, and uneven varnishes that altered surface texture and discoloured over time.
• The key evidence: A black-and-white photograph, understood to predate the 1960s treatment, showed more of the composition than survives today. The painting had apparently been reduced in size during that restoration, possibly to fit a new stretcher or because damaged edges were folded over and effectively removed.
• What vanished: The photograph documented a curl of hair beneath the sitter’s ear that is now missing, parts of a decorative screen that had faded or disappeared, and delicate passages overpainted with heavier marks. The team also found pentimenti, changes made by Chase himself, not visible in the old image.
• The method: Conservator Suzanne Siano and her team at Modern Art Conservation used AI to merge the historical photograph with a colour image of the painting, producing a composite that mapped where the two diverged. Siano said the appeal was speed: not instantaneous, but considerably faster than assembling the comparison by hand.
• The signature: One finding concerned Chase’s signature, which had become extremely faint, with some letters apparently buried under overpaint. Siano said that because the signature is relatively abstract, an earlier conservator may have mistaken it for part of the carpet pattern and painted over it.
• The caution: Siano said it is difficult to establish whether all the changes came from earlier conservation, suggesting a previous conservator may have been cleaning toward what they believed was the original surface while removing additions Chase himself had made.
• Limits applied: The team did not reinstate every discrepancy the software flagged. The old photograph was neither high-resolution nor necessarily a record of the earliest state, so its evidence was weighed against magnified examination, ultraviolet imaging, knowledge of Chase’s materials, and comparison with his other works.
• The verdict: Siano said conservation combines science, art history, craft, manual skill and artistry, and that “AI is none of those things.” She expects its use in treatment decisions to stay highly case-specific, while growing more valuable for research such as locating historical images.
• The funding: The project was supported by a Bank of America grant. It was the first time Siano’s studio had used AI as an aid in conserving a painting.

Background:

The Parrish Art Museum sits on Long Island’s East End, where Chase spent time during his career as a prominent Gilded Age figure in New York. The museum holds a substantial body of his work alongside archival material donated by the artist’s family.

Between the lines:

The strongest finding here is not what AI added but what it exposed about human judgment: a signature misread as carpet pattern, and original brushwork possibly stripped as though it were later overpaint. The composite image was a sorting tool, not a verdict, since the team still weighed it against ultraviolet imaging and Chase’s known materials before touching the surface.

What’s next

The restored painting goes on view 14 November in the Parrish exhibition, which runs to 21 March 2027. Whether other studios adopt the composite-imaging method will be the signal that this was more than a one-off experiment.