The application of the final layer of varnish in December 2025 marked the successful completion of conservation work on Potter’s The Bull. Following a scientific examination, since summer 2024 conservators Abbie Vandivere and Jolijn Schilder have worked on the famous painting in full view of the public. The painting has become ‘three-dimensional’; visitors will now get a different impression of The Bull and the landscape that surrounds him, with more depth and contrast. Discoloured layers of varnish and overpaint from previous restorations have been removed, damages have been repaired, and the painting ‘shines’ once more.
Abbie and Jolijn: ‘We spent a year-and-a-half looking over Potter’s shoulder and learned a lot about how he worked on this painting. Potter was very spontaneous and somewhat indecisive. He changed the picture repeatedly during the painting process, adding things or removing them. Our goal was to bring the painting as close as possible to what he intended when he finished The Bull in 1647. I think we can say we succeeded. It was a journey through time, through all those centuries since the painting was first created.’
Challenges
When asked about the biggest challenges, the conservators explained that the greatest technical challenge was the removal of restoration materials, because some of it was two centuries old, and difficult to separate from Potter’s paint. This meant they had to work with extreme caution. They also faced ethical dilemmas. How far to take the retouching (repair or replacement of damaged or lost sections of the painting) without covering Potter’s work, for example. Some of the pigments Potter used in his paint had faded after 380 years, gradually revealing the layers underneath. In each section, the conservators considered whether this ‘disrupted’ the image as a whole. If so, they carefully applied reversible retouching; where the overall image was not disturbed, things were left as they were.
Pentimenti
Abbie and Jolijn examined six large paintings by Potter and saw a recurring phenomenon: he would often change elements of the composition during the painting process. They discovered an extraordinarily large number of changes (known as pentimenti) in The Bull, not least because Potter enlarged the painting significantly while working on it. The pentimenti in The Bull include a fence, which originally continued beneath the animal’s head; changes to the size of the bull’s body in several places; covering a large plant that originally stood near the cow; and radical alterations to the buildings on the horizon. Although Potter was young when he painted The Bull (22), he was clearly not afraid of experimenting.
French branch
The dilemmas associated with the ‘French branch’ were tricky. The painting was looted by French revolutionary troops in 1795 and taken to Paris, where it was hung in the Louvre. There, some damage was overpainted by adding an extra branch to the tree. Since this was never Potter’s intention, and the branch – despite being small – affected the entire composition, what do to about it was long the subject of debate. The upshot was that the branch has now been overpainted (again, reversibly), so that the viewer no longer sees it, and there is more space above the bull, as Potter originally intended. Potter’s The Bull will hang in the publicly accessible conservation workshop for another month, and from the end of February will be back in its usual place in the ‘Potter Gallery’. Last year saw the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Paulus Potter’s birth. On 17 January 2026 it will be 372 years since he died.
