I like to take photographs of paintings. Surprisingly it’s possible in quite a few of the big museums.
When I do it, I don’t strive to reproduce what I saw while being there. Instead I try to correct the images, much like I do with my own photographs.
Over the centuries the varnish of paintings tends to get yellow, even brownish. The effect is very similar to a color temperature that’s set too high. It turns out that you can very effectively remove the color cast of paintings in Lightroom. Of course I can’t be sure that this is how the paintings were originally intended, but normally the results look extremely balanced.