This Dutch Painting Showed a 17th-Century Drinking Game Until Someone Smudged Out a Player, Spoiling the Fun. A Museum Just Restored the Imbibing Soldier

Pieter de Hooch was known for his 17th-century portrayals of domestic life. Some scenes suggested scandal or taught a moral

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

August 10, 2026 3:24 p.m.

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Two’s company, three’s a crowd. Perhaps that was the logic someone used hundreds of years ago when altering Pieter de Hooch’s A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard (1658-60) by painting over the image of a beer-wielding soldier, removing him from the presence of the two other main figures.

Or, the change may instead have been inspired by money—removing the soldier made the painting unique, and therefore more valuable. Or maybe, researchers speculate, it was a certain commitment to modesty that inspired the erasure. The original scene, with two men seated at a table smoking and drinking while a standing woman takes a swig of beer, would have suggested an air of debauchery, which de Hooch was known to incorporate into his works.

The Netherlands-based Mauritshuis art museum recently revived the original vision laid out by de Hooch, a 17th-century painter who mastered portrayals of domestic life during the Dutch Golden Age. Conservators decided to paint the missing man back into the scene and rename the artwork Figures in a Courtyard.

“[It] is now much more moralistic,” Judith Niessen, the head of collections and research at the Mauritshuis, tells the Art Newspaper’s Senay Boztas, “which was the intention of de Hooch.”

Restorers had a precise guide for returning the soldier to the canvas. De Hooch painted a second copy—simply called A Dutch Courtyard—held at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. In this nearly identical version, the soldier in the middle of the scene was never altered, allowing Mauritshuis restorers Sabrina Meloni and Abbie Vandivere to use him as a model.

“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 tells 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.”

Here’s how the game worked, according to the National Gallery of Art: “Each participant had to drink down to a circular line on the glass; failing to reach the exact level, the reveler would be required to drink down to the next ring. Only when this was done successfully would the glass be passed on to the next participant.”

Researchers only have a general idea of when the soldier was scrubbed from the original artwork, which was completed in 1660. In 1833, the painting was listed in a catalog—which made no mention of the soldier—for the John Smith Gallery in London. Because the gallery acquired the painting in 1822, it is speculated that the change was made sometime before that, Codart reports.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that an art restorer named Martin de Wild discovered that the soldier had been painted over. Instead of returning him to the scene, de Wild took a photograph of his finding and then touched up the removal, leaving the absent figure’s beer tanker and pipe resting on the table. Subsequent macro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy research, conducted with the Rijksmuseum, did not turn up any conclusive evidence as to who may have scrubbed the soldier, or why.

De Hooch’s works often carried innuendo. During a recent restoration of his painting A Musical Conversation (1674), conservators said that refreshing the piece to a more vibrant condition helped illuminate the artwork’s suggestive plot.

“This is what is known as a merry-company scene and involves the possible invitation for a ‘musical duet,’ which would have been known by Dutch people of the era to speak to sensual and mischievous undercurrents versus chaste love,” Catherine Whitney, director of curatorial affairs at the Honolulu Museum of Art, said in a statement. “The dog and the background painting of Venus, the goddess of sensual love, would have added recognizable implications.”

Another de Hooch painting, A Woman Drinking With Two Men (1658), in which the three figures are also gathered around a table and imbibing, carries similar intrigue.

“…Depictions of musical gatherings were especially ambiguous—they can represent innocent entertainments or something more salacious,” according to a statement from London’s National Gallery, which holds the painting. “We can’t be sure if what we see here is a musical gathering, however, let alone whether or not it is an innocent one.”

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.