This year’s Tefaf Museum Restoration Fund (TMRF) has been awarded to Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister for its restoration of The Boar Hunt (1616-18) by Peter Paul Rubens.
“The special significance of Dresden’s The Boar Hunt is evident from the painting’s previous owners: Peter Paul Rubens painted it for himself, without commission,” says Bernd Ebert, the diarector general of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections). “Years later, he sold it to the Duke of Buckingham, and it later found its way into the Imperial collection in Prague before King August III acquired it for Dresden in 1749.” During the Second World War it was moved to Moscow where it spent ten years in storage before returning to Dresden, where it has remained since the mid-1950s.
Despite its numerous relocations, the painting has escaped serious damage, but the true dynamism of its composition and original palette are obscured by a thick layer of discoloured 19th-century varnish, says Uta Neidhardt, the senior curator at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
Undoing damaging repairs
“During the creation process of the painting—presumably by Rubens and/or his workshop—a 24cm-wide board was subsequently added to the upper edge of the panel,” Neidhardt tells The Art Newspaper. “During the course of the 19th century, several stabilisation measures were carried out by gluing battens across the wood grain. This soon led to problems, as cracks began to appear in the wooden panel. After the removal of these damaging battens, the cracks were then stabilised.” The panel had also been thinned down to 8mm, making it extremely fragile. Conservators are currently cleaning the painting using ethanol, removing layers of varnish, surface dirt and old retouchings.
The painting’s restoration is based upon extensive examinations carried out as part of the four-year research and exhibition programme dedicated to Rubens’s Dresden corpus of nearly 40 works, in collaboration with the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA), and the University of Antwerp’s AXIS research group.
The freshly restored painting will be unveiled in the exhibition Rubens in Dresden at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (25 June 2027-10 January 2028), marking the 450th anniversary of the painter’s birth.
