Tear is the most common form of structural damage to oil painting canvas and directly affects the stability and long-term safety of the oil painting support. In the past fifty years or so, local tear mending has received increasing attention and been widely adopted as a minimal-intervention alternative to full canvas lining. This paper reviews the causes and classification of canvas tears, the development of canvas tear mending techniques and concepts, local tear mending materials, and the local tear mending process through literature summarization, points out the defects of current studies, and discusses the application value of local tear mending techniques through the case study method, aiming to provide sufficient references for the practical treatments of canvas tear mending of oil paintings.