Art and antiques are not a one-time investment. Begin collecting art and you’ll quickly discover there are myriad other associated costs beyond the price of a piece: you might need to insure your fine art or ship your fine art, and you’ll certainly want to spend the money to care for it. Art is, after all, meant to last lifetimes—and to grow in value. But that can’t happen if works are neglected and allowed to deteriorate (something nearly all works are prone to, given time). Knowing how to care for the works in your art collection is no less important than understanding what to buy and for how much.

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Dealers are often hesitant to discuss the kinds of care the objects they are selling will need as they don’t want to scare potential buyers away, but savvy collectors can obtain much of the information they’ll need by talking with museum curators or conservators. Many are happy to make the time to speak with curious art collectors as a way of scouting out future acquisitions for their institutions.

That said, there’s also plenty you can learn about caring for fine art by reading books on the subject, which many museum libraries have on their shelves. It stands to reason as the institutions that house the world’s greatest collections of art and antiquities have much at stake when it comes to conservation and invest accordingly—and collectors can learn from them.

Most museums, for example, have high-tech temperature and humidity monitoring systems controlling the interior environment. “In a perfect world, art sits in a dark room that is heat and humidity controlled,” Amber Schabdach, head of painting conservation at The Conservation Center in Chicago, Illinois, told Observer. “Obviously, that’s not how people live.” Most people periodically open and close windows in the spring and fall, and turn on the heat or air-conditioning in the winter or summer. That creates rapid fluctuations in heat and humidity that may, in the case of paintings, affect the canvas, the stretcher, the paints and the varnish, each of which expands and contracts at different rates. In high humidity, a canvas expands, causing a slight dimensional change. The paint layer, however, does not swell to the same degree and then cracks, permitting more moisture to enter, leading to further cracking later on. If this situation is not corrected, the bond between the paint and the canvas will loosen and the paint can begin to flake off.

Works on paper also react negatively to high humidity. The paper, as with all wood, tends to expand in moist environments, which results in wrinkling and discoloration. The most common reddish-brown discoloration is called “foxing” and is caused by copper or iron ions reacting in the presence of mold or bacterial growth. Light is another seemingly benign environmental factor that can be seriously detrimental to artwork. All objects are made up of molecules, and light energy can cause those molecules to separate. When that happens, it releases acidity, which is a product of the reactions, and that eats away at canvas and paint, causing fading.

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Still, Schabdach noted, care can be taken to minimize the problems that changing environmental conditions may cause in precious objects. There are some easy, practical ways that conservators recommend to collectors. Don’t put artwork in front of........

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