When restoring panel paintings, one is often confronted with the problem of gluing rents and cracked joints. The difficulty is not so much pressing the picture together from the sides as leveling the unevenness of the surface. Large canvas paintings marred by cracks, holes and rents in the middle present the same problem: how to reach the glued areas to apply the necessary pressure to smooth the roughness. Various apparatus have appeared in trade journals, but due to their size, they cannot readily be placed in every studio. Moreover, the mechanisms ordinarily used to apply pressure do so only laterally, but do not level the unevenness. For this purpose, we introduce here a device which is versatile, easy to handle and space saving.