This yr’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 particular significance of Dresden’s The Boar Hunt is clear from the portray’s earlier homeowners: Peter Paul Rubens painted it for himself, with out fee,” says Bernd Ebert, the diarector basic of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Artwork Collections). “Years later, he offered it to the Duke of Buckingham, and it later discovered its approach into the Imperial assortment in Prague earlier than King August III acquired it for Dresden in 1749.” In the course of the Second World Struggle it was moved to Moscow the place it spent ten years in storage earlier than returning to Dresden, the place it has remained for the reason that mid-Fifties.
Regardless of its quite a few relocations, the portray has escaped severe harm, however the true dynamism of its composition and unique palette are obscured by a thick layer of discoloured Nineteenth-century varnish, says Uta Neidhardt, the senior curator on the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
Undoing damaging repairs
“In the course of the creation technique of the portray—presumably by Rubens and/or his workshop—a 24cm-wide board was subsequently added to the higher fringe of the panel,” Neidhardt tells The Artwork Newspaper. “Throughout the course of the Nineteenth century, a number of stabilisation measures have been carried out by gluing battens throughout the wooden grain. This quickly led to issues, as cracks began appearing within the picket panel. After the elimination of those damaging battens, the cracks have been then stabilised.” The panel had additionally been thinned all the way down to 8mm, making it extraordinarily fragile. Conservators are at present cleansing the portray utilizing ethanol, eradicating layers of varnish, floor dust and previous retouchings.
The portray’s restoration is predicated upon in depth examinations carried out as a part of the four-year analysis and exhibition programme devoted to Rubens’s Dresden corpus of practically 40 works, in collaboration with the Dresden Academy of Fantastic Arts, the Royal Museum of Fantastic Arts Antwerp (KMSKA), and the College of Antwerp’s AXIS analysis group.
The freshly restored portray can be unveiled within the exhibition Rubens in Dresden on the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (25 June 2027-10 January 2028), marking the 450th anniversary of the painter’s beginning.
