Karen French has been conserving paintings for over 30 years; the last 20 plus of which have been at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is a senior conservator of paintings. Born and educated in the U.K., she trained in painting conservation at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She specialized in treating paintings on wooden panel, as well as canvas paintings, and broadened her experience by working in a variety of studios in Europe and North America: the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich; the Area Museums Service for the South East of England, London; the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence; the Prado, Madrid, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.