THE HAGUE.- After more than a year of painstaking work carried out in full public view, The Bull by Paulus Potter has emerged from restoration with a renewed presence that is already reshaping how the iconic painting is experienced. The conservation project, completed in December 2025 with the application of a final varnish layer, marks a major milestone for one of the most celebrated works in the collection of the Mauritshuis.
Led by conservators Abbie Vandivere and Jolijn Schilder, the restoration followed an extensive research phase and unfolded over roughly eighteen months. Throughout the process, visitors were able to watch the work up close in the museum’s publicly accessible restoration studio—an unusually transparent approach that turned conservation into a shared journey of discovery.
The results are striking. Freed from centuries of yellowed varnish and later overpaintings, The Bull now appears more spatial, more luminous, and more dynamic. Depth and contrast have been restored across the landscape, while subtle details—long obscured—have regained clarity. Damage has been carefully stabilized, past interventions removed, and the painting once again “breathes,” as the conservators describe it.
“For a year and a half, it felt like we were looking over Potter’s shoulder,” Vandivere and Schilder said. “We learned just how spontaneous and changeable he was. He constantly adjusted the composition—adding, removing, rethinking. Our goal was always to come as close as possible to Potter’s original intention in 1647. This restoration really was a journey through time.”
One of the most revealing aspects of the project was the discovery of an extraordinary number of pentimenti—visible traces of changes made during the painting process. While Potter frequently revised his works, The Bull stands out for the sheer scale of its transformations. The artist even enlarged the canvas as he worked, altering the animal’s proportions, repositioning landscape elements, and reworking buildings on the horizon. Remarkably, Potter was just 22 years old when he painted the monumental scene, yet he worked with a confidence and experimental spirit that feels startlingly modern.
Perhaps the most dramatic change for regular visitors is the sky. Before restoration, a dark, looming storm appeared to threaten the figures below. That ominous weather, however, turned out to be a later overpainting added to mask an old area of damage. With it removed, the scene now unfolds under a bright early-summer sky—likely May or June—revealing Potter’s original, far more naturalistic sense of atmosphere.
Equally debated was the so-called “French branch,” a small addition painted onto the tree after the work was taken to Paris by French revolutionary troops in 1795 and displayed in the Louvre. Although minor, the branch subtly altered the balance of the composition. After careful ethical consideration, conservators chose to remove it reversibly, restoring the open space above the bull and honoring Potter’s original vision.
For now, The Bull remains on view in the restoration studio for another month, allowing visitors a final chance to see the painting up close in its newly restored state. By the end of February, it will return to its permanent home in the Mauritshuis’s Potter Room.
The timing is poignant. Last year marked 400 years since Paulus Potter’s birth, and on January 17, 2026, the 372nd anniversary of his death is commemorated. With this restoration, The Bull stands once again not just as an icon of Dutch Golden Age painting, but as a vivid record of artistic experimentation—alive with the decisions, doubts, and daring of a young master at work.
