The portrait was found under the painting “Head of a Peasant Woman”.
Specialists of the National Gallery of Scotland discovered Vincent's paintings Van Gogh's “Head of a Peasant Woman” is a previously unknown self-portrait of the artist. As the BBC reports, the discovery was made thanks to the fact that during the preparation for the exhibition, the canvas was exposed to X-rays.
The self-portrait was hidden under layers of glue and cardboard. Senior gallery employee Leslie Stevenson admitted that she felt a “shock” when she saw Van Gogh's self-portrait. She added that this is an important discovery because it adds to what we already know about the artist's life.
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Van Gogh often reused canvases to save money. His works were not sold during his lifetime, fame came to him only after his death. The artist died in 1890 at the age of 37.
“Head of a Peasant Woman” entered the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland in 1960 as part of a gift from a well-known Edinburgh lawyer. The canvas depicts a local woman from the town of Nynen in the south of the Netherlands, where the artist lived from December 1883 to November 1885.
Van Gogh probably painted the self-portrait from the other side later, at a key moment in his career after , when he moved to Paris and got acquainted with the works of the French Impressionists.
Approximately 15 years after his death, the Head of a Peasant Woman was loaned to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Researchers believe that it was then that the canvas was pasted onto cardboard before being framed. It seems that the “Head of a Peasant Woman” was considered more “finished” than the self-portrait on the other side.
According to experts, it is possible to restore the hidden self-portrait, but the process of removing the glue and cardboard will require delicate conservation work. Researchers are trying to figure out how to do this without damaging the “Head of a Peasant Woman”.
Earlier the curators of the Haifa University Museum in Israel discovered previously unknown drawings under Amadeo Modigliani's painting “Nude in a Hat”. The discovery was made with the help of X-ray scanning of the canvas.
