Brian Baade
Biography
Brian Baade worked as a practicing painter and illustrator after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before devoting his career to technical art history and painting conservation. He graduated from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation in 2006. Brian majored in painting conservation with a focus on the identification and analysis of historic painting materials and techniques. He has worked at the Chateau Parentignat in France, in Amsterdam, where he assisted Dr. Leslie Carlyle with the analysis and reconstruction of media used by Van Gogh, and Yale University Art Gallery.
After graduate school, Brian accepted a WUDPAC Limited Term Researcher position to teach historical art materials and techniques, and conservation courses to undergraduate and graduate conservation students. He was the author of the chapter on using dry pigments for the Paintings Specialty Group Inpainting catalog. Since then, Brian has spearheaded four projects funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the University of Delaware to create historically accurate reconstructions of paintings from the distributed Kress collection and disseminate this knowledge through workshops and a website.
He was the primary researcher responsible for creating the first technical study of the paintings and techniques of Henry Ossawa Tanner for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Brian has continued work on Tanner and is an author on many subsequent publications about the artist and his techniques. He is also the co-creator and chief moderator of The Materials Information and Technical Resources for Artists (MITRA) website and forum hosted by the University of Delaware and is a member of the American Society for Testing and Materials D01.57, Artists’ Materials subgroup.
Brian is now an Associate Professor at the University of Delaware where he teaches courses in the materials and techniques of Western art, inpainting, and technical art history as well as heading numerous technical studies. Brian spends his spare time treating paintings with his conservator wife, Dr. Kristin deGhetaldi and co-parenting their daughter Lorelei.
