A routine cataloging procedure of a painting by Vincent van Gogh in the National Galleries in Scotland resulted in an unexpected discovery: There was a hidden self-portrait (van Gogh’s self-portrait) on the back of the canvas. The portrait emerged while performing an X-ray analysis of The Head of the Peasant Woman as part of a cataloging effort in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. When the exhibition opens, visitors will be able to view the X-ray image through a specially prepared light box in the middle of the screen.
X-ray imaging techniques are a well-established tool that helps analyze and repair valuable paintings, as the higher frequency of the rays pass directly through them without damaging them. X-ray imaging can reveal anything that was painted on a canvas or that the artist may have altered the original vision.
For example, Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter in an Open Window was first subjected to X-ray analysis in 1979, revealing an image of Cupid lurking beneath the overpainting. And in 2020, a team of Dutch and French scientists used high-energy X-rays to reveal the secret recipe for Rembrandt’s famous impasto technique, believed to have been lost to history. Over time, many different paintings and works of art have encountered and analyzed these rays.
Of course, this isn’t the first time a Van Gogh painting has been subjected to X-ray analysis. In 2008, European scientists used synchrotron radiation to recreate a hidden portrait of a peasant woman painted by Van Gogh. Known for his reuse of canvases, the artist painted on it when he created Piece of Grass in 1887. Synchrotron radiation excites atoms on the canvas, and these atoms emit their own X-rays that a fluorescent detector can then capture. Each element in the picture has its own X-ray signature, so scientists can determine the distribution of each in many layers of paint.
Van Gogh was also known to reuse a canvas by painting its back side. As Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey writes in The Art Newspaper, “The Edinburgh painting is not the only double-sided painting by van Gogh with reused canvas. In 1929, Dutch conservator Jan Cornelius Traas removed the cardboard backing from three Nuenen paintings and revealed the hidden portraits on the reverse. And we can say that it has long been suspected that there might be something on the hidden side of a Peasant Woman’s Head.”
Completed in May 1885, The Head of the Peasant Woman is one of Van Gogh’s more modest works and was donated to the National Galleries in 1960 by an Edinburgh lawyer named Alexander Maitland. According to the museum, experts now believe it is part of a series of work by Van Gogh in connection with a larger painting, The Potato Eaters (currently on display at the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam), completed in May 1885.
The museum’s keepers didn’t expect much when they submitted the small painting for X-ray analysis. The resulting image revealed a portrait of a bearded spectator, much like Van Gogh, in a brimmed hat with a neckerchief loosely tied around his throat. The portrait was most likely made in the early 20th century, possibly covered with layers of glue and cardboard to make the painting more secure before framing it for an exhibition.
The next step seems to be figuring out how to remove the layers of adhesive and cardboard covering the self-portrait without damaging the other painting. More than a century later, the state of the self-portrait is unclear…
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