Care of the collections began before the museum came into existence as Charles Lang Freer, the founder of the Freer Gallery of Art, hired Japanese painting restorers to care for his works and to prepare them for their eventual home as part of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1932, the Freer Gallery of Art hired a full-time Japanese restorer and created what was to become the East Asian Painting Conservation Studio. The Technical Laboratory, and the first use of scientific methods for the study of art at the Smithsonian Institution, started in 1951 when the chemist Rutherford J. Gettens moved from the Fogg Museum at Harvard University to the Freer. The East Asian Painting Conservation Studio and the Technical Laboratory merged in 1990 to form the Department of Conservation and Scientific Research.

A permanent staff of fourteen works hand-in-hand with a large, changing group of term employees, contract workers, fellows, interns, and visiting scholars. (See staff list). Our work is focused on three areas: conservation of the Freer and Sackler collections, the use of scientific methods of research for the study of Asian art, and educational efforts, particularly in the field of East Asian painting conservation.