Visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston will soon be able to watch a 17th-century painting being brought back to life in front of them. From December 9, the museum will open a pop-up restoration studio in the Innovation Gallery of its Center for Netherlandish Art, where the year-long conservation of Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy's The Founders of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants Guild, painted in 1625, will take place in full view of the public.

The group portrait depicts the six founding members of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants Guild, a lucrative trade body that operated until the late 18th century. The museum acquired the painting last year, and the conservation project will see conservators, scientists, art historians and curators take turns working on it in the open studio, giving visitors a direct look at how a four-hundred-year-old canvas is examined, cleaned and stabilised.

The decision to stage the work in public reflects a wider shift in museums towards showing conservation as part of the visitor experience rather than keeping it behind closed doors. Instead of disappearing into a laboratory for a year, the Pickenoy will remain on display in a working state, with the specialists responsible for its care visible as they go about their tasks. The museum's approach treats the restoration itself as an exhibition, inviting the public to follow a process that is usually hidden.

For Boston, the project also puts the spotlight on the Center for Netherlandish Art, the museum's dedicated space for Dutch and Flemish art, and on a work that records the civic pride of Amsterdam's merchant elite at the height of the Dutch Golden Age. The conservation begins in December and is expected to run for a full year.