A soldier who vanished from a 17th-century Dutch courtyard painting centuries ago has been painted back in. The Mauritshuis in The Hague completed a restoration of Pieter de Hooch's A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard (c. 1658–60) that returned the figure to the canvas — and gave the work a new name: Figures in a Courtyard (The Art Newspaper).

De Hooch, a painter from Delft — like Vermeer — built his reputation on scenes of the city's architecture, interiors and daily life. The painting shows a man smoking, a woman drinking and a child in a Dutch courtyard. The soldier was originally a fourth figure in the composition, but at some point after de Hooch's lifetime the figure was painted over, leaving only three people in the frame (Mauritshuis).

The removal happened well before the painting entered the Mauritshuis collection. The museum determined that the soldier was painted out certainly before 1822, and a 1833 catalogue listing from the John Smith Gallery in London described the work without the soldier. The Mauritshuis concluded that de Hooch himself did not paint out the figure, but could not establish who removed it or why (The Art Newspaper; Mauritshuis).

The clue that the soldier belonged there was sitting across an ocean. A second version of the same composition, titled A Dutch Courtyard and held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, still contains the soldier figure. That surviving twin helped Mauritshuis restorers Sabrina Meloni and Abbie Vandivere confirm what the overpainted canvas had been hiding (The Art Newspaper).

Meloni and Vandivere painted the soldier back using a reversible technique, meaning the addition can be undone by future conservators without damaging the original paint layer beneath. The decision to repaint rather than leave the ghost of the figure visible reflects the museum's reading of the evidence: de Hooch intended four figures, and the Washington version shows what the soldier looked like.

The restored painting is part of a broader programme at the Mauritshuis examining conservation dilemmas in its collection. The museum had previously described the work's treatment as "the mystery of the lost soldier" (Mauritshuis). The mystery of who did the removing, though, remains open.