Hidden Portrait of Woman Found Beneath Van Gogh Painting

By Anastacia Mott Austin

It’s well known that Vincent Van Gogh used to paint over his existing works, sometimes to save money. Some art experts estimate that as many as a third of his paintings have other images underneath.

This week two scientists using a particle accelerator were able to bring out a detailed image of the portrait of a woman that was painted underneath Van Gogh’s work, "Patch of Grass."

The image, done in gray, brown, and red pigments, is a startling contrast to the blues, yellows, and greens of the top work. Experts say that Van Gogh would have painted the woman’s portrait sometime between 1884 and 1885, just before his "potato eaters" period.

The idea of using x-rays to bring out images of paintings under other paintings is not new, but the technique until now has only been able to create hazy black-and-white images.

But two men, Joris Dik from Delfts University and his colleague Koen Janssens, a chemist from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, worked together using higher-intensity "synchrotron radiation" x-rays and chemical knowledge of older paint pigment composition to reconstruct the color image of the woman beneath Van Gogh’s painting.

The two published their discovery in this week’s edition of the Journal of Analytical Chemistry.

"I was really surprised by the quality of the image, which is really promising for the future of research," said Teio Meedendorp, an expert in Van Gogh’s paintings.

While a fuzzy image of an outline of a head had already been discovered underneath "Patch of Grass," this is the first time the underlying painting has been seen in such colorful detail since Van Gogh painted it.

"The hidden painting dovetails with an extensive series of heads from the artist’s period in the Netherlands," wrote the authors. "Between October 1884 and May 1885 he painted the heads of peasant models in the dark settings of their huts, in the neighborhood of the village of Nuenen." Van Gogh mailed several paintings to his brother Theo in Paris, and later came to live with him. Once there, he painted over several of the older works.

What the new technology means is that other great artists’ work which may have been painted over (a common practice during the time of many prominent painters, including Rembrandt and Picasso) can possibly be rediscovered using this newer technique.

"Patch of Grass" was painted by van Gogh in Paris in 1887 and is owned by the Kröller-Müller Museum in the rural eastern Netherlands.