Rubens’s “The Boar Hunt” Heads to the Conservation Studio in Dresden Ahead of a 2027 Unveiling
A familiar kind of drama is returning to Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Boar Hunt” (1616–18) — not on the painted panel itself, but in the conservation studio. The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden has begun a major restoration of the work, funded this year by the Tefaf Museum Restoration Fund (TMRF), with the goal of recovering the painting’s original palette and the kinetic force of its composition.
The Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) reportedly made the picture for himself rather than for a patron, a detail that underscores its special status within the painter’s output. “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,” Bernd Ebert, the director general of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections), said.
From Rubens’s own possession, the painting entered a high-profile chain of ownership. Rubens later sold it to the Duke of Buckingham; it subsequently moved into the Imperial collection in Prague before King August III acquired it for Dresden in 1749. The panel also bears the imprint of 20th-century upheaval: during the Second World War it was transferred to Moscow, where it remained in storage for 10 years, returning to Dresden in the mid-1950s.
Despite that itinerary, the painting avoided catastrophic damage. Its current problem is subtler — and, for viewers, decisive. A thick layer of discolored 19th-century varnish has dulled the surface, obscuring what Uta Neidhardt, senior curator at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, describes as the work’s true dynamism and original color.
Conservators are now removing that veil. The team is cleaning the painting with ethanol, taking off layers of varnish along with surface dirt and older retouching campaigns. The treatment is also confronting the legacy of earlier structural “solutions” that introduced new risks.
Neidhardt notes that during the painting’s making — presumably by Rubens and or his workshop — a 24cm-wide board was added to the upper edge of the panel. In the 19th century, further stabilization efforts included battens glued across the wood grain. Those additions soon proved counterproductive, contributing to cracks in the panel. After the battens were removed, the cracks were stabilized, but the panel had also been thinned to just 8mm, leaving it exceptionally fragile.
The restoration is not an isolated intervention but part of a broader scholarly push. It builds on extensive technical examinations conducted within a four-year research and exhibition program focused on Rubens’s Dresden corpus, which totals nearly 40 works. The initiative is being carried out 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 museum plans to present the newly restored “The Boar Hunt” in the exhibition “Rubens in Dresden,” opening at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister on June 25, 2027, and running through January 10, 2028. The timing is pointed: the show will coincide with the 450th anniversary of Rubens’s birth, offering audiences a chance to see one of Dresden’s most storied Rubens paintings with its surface clarity — and its pictorial velocity — newly recovered.
