A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard — the altered version. Credit: Mauritshuis

Time to step away from number-heavy science and into a Dutch courtyard, where one restored figure has changed the whole story.

For generations, Pieter de Hooch’s A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard, painted around 1658 to 1660, seemed to show a man, a woman and a child taking a break in the sun. After a recent restoration at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the scene has recovered its missing tension. A soldier who had been painted out centuries ago has been largely reinstated, turning the seemingly quiet moment into a drinking game with moral stakes.

The Third Figure at the Table

De Hooch, a master of Dutch domestic scenes, built the painting around order: brick walls, measured light, a gate opening onto another space, and figures arranged with calm precision.

But something was wrong with the picture. On the table sat an open beer tankard and a pipe belonging to… no one? A cloak hung over a gate, also without an owner.

The missing owner was a soldier in armor.

The Mauritshuis could reconstruct him because De Hooch painted nearly the same composition in another work from the same period. That version, A Dutch Courtyard, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., still shows the soldier seated between the smoking man and the drinking woman.

His presence changes the narrative. The woman is apparently using a pass-glass, a marked glass used in drinking games. Each player had to drink exactly down to a ring. Miss the line, and the player had to drink to the next one.

“The men are challenging the woman to a drinking game — that is the subject of the painting,” restorer Sabrina Meloni said in a Mauritshuis press release.

But Why? The painting during restoration. Credit: Mauritshuis

The soldier’s disappearance was not unknown. In the 1920s, the restorer Martin de Wild uncovered him, photographed him in black and white, and then painted over the surviving remains again.

When Mauritshuis conservators revisited the painting, they faced a difficult choice. Should they preserve the altered version that viewers had known for centuries, or bring back De Hooch’s original design?

They chose to return the soldier, but with restraint. The restoration is reversible, so future conservators can remove the new work. Meloni and fellow restorer Abbie Vandivere also avoided making him too crisp against the aged surface.

“Over the past 360 years, the painting’s pigments have partially discoloured. We therefore chose a more understated, less detailed depiction of the soldier [to help the figure blend in],” Meloni noted.

Technical research, including macro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy with the Rijksmuseum, could not solve who removed the soldier, when, or why.

The figure was already gone by 1833, when the painting appeared in a London gallery catalogue with no mention of him. Since the gallery had owned the painting since 1822, the erasure happened sometime between the 1660s and the early 19th century.

From Calm Courtyard to Moral Warning Figures in a Courtyard — the restored version. Credit: Mauritshuis

The motive remains uncertain. A later owner might have wanted a more modest scene. Someone might have disliked soldiers. Or a dealer might have hoped that removing the figure would make the painting seem more distinct from De Hooch’s Washington version.

Judith Niessen, head of collections and research at the Mauritshuis, said the restoration changes how viewers read the scene.

“With only the man and the woman at the table, the painting seems to be way more innocent than with the second man present,” Niessen told The Art Newspaper. “Where she would be just drinking a glass of beer before, now it is much more obvious that they are playing a drinking game, where she is drinking the pass-glass and the two men are not.”

That moral edge fits De Hooch’s world. Dutch Golden Age painters often filled scenes of music, drink, and flirtation with double meanings. The pleasure was visible. The warning was there for anyone willing to see it.

The restored painting, now renamed Figures in a Courtyard, is on view in Room 15 of the Mauritshuis before traveling to Madrid for a Mauritshuis-Thyssen-Bornemisza exhibition.

The erased man has taken his seat again. With him, the painting has regained its humor, its balance, and its bite.