Mary Sebera, an unassuming woman with short brown hair, stands in her sunlit workspace in the Baltimore Museum of Art, a nearly 10-foot-tall painting towering above her. “I think I have done most of what I need to do for it,” she says. The piece is “At the Bathers Pool (Venus Is Still Venus),” a 1985 work by African-American painter Robert Colescott. It depicts three women—one white and two black—wading in a vibrant teal-hued pool, while two other women look on.

The senior paintings conservator at the museum, and, in fact, the only conservator who works on paintings, Sebera had just spent nearly a week painstakingly removing grime and tiny carpet fibers from the massive painting, going over the entire surface with a moistened cotton swab the size of a Q-tip. She wears a magnifying headset, at times lying prone on the floor, at others standing on a stepstool. And while cleaning the back of the canvas, which had been hidden behind a backing board, Sebera discovered something interesting. The painting had long been known by the title above, but there on the stretcher, in the artist’s hand, was the phrase “Three Graces: Venus Is Still Venus.” “These kinds of interesting things turn up in paintings all the time,” Sebera says. “In this case we really did learn something about the artist and the way he thought of the painting.” (The BMA has contacted the gallery that represents Colescott, and the title may soon officially change to reflect Sebera’s discovery.)

Sebera, who has worked in conservation at the BMA for more than two decades, is quick to acknowledge that her line of work calls for a certain temperament. Patience and acceptance of tedium are prerequisites, as, of course, is attention to detail. “It’s all about being careful, and being respectful to the work is very important.” But she is a woman who clearly loves her job. “I find it very satisfying,” she says. “I like the objects.” Sebera seems to have an affection for her charges, and a level of intimacy with them akin, nearly, to that of the artist. She retrieves a small 1856 Edgar Degas self-portrait from a storage room and walks it into the light. “Now this is a cute little thing,” she says. Sebera recently removed a layer of discolored varnish from the work and did some toning to harmonize an old repair with the original painting.

Over the years, Sebera has worked on Pop Art, on Old Masters, on Rembrandts. Once, memorably, she treated Cezanne’s “Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From Bibemus Quarry”; in the process of cleaning the yellowed varnish, the gray-blue sky turned cerulean. “It was very humbling,” Sebera says. As for the treatment itself, she says it was “not a scary kind” because Cezanne used strong, solid paints and did not use glazes, which can make a painting delicate. “He was a great technician and a great craftsman,” she says.

> Email Andrea Appleton