Number paint canvas1/5/2024 In a typical year, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam takes up to 300 inquiries from people believing they have discovered a lost Van Gogh, but very few are found to be legitimate. Inspired by the likes of Georges Seurat and Paul Gauguin, he adopted a more colourful and expressive style of painting, experimenting with broken brushwork for the first time, using himself as a model and re-using canvases to save money. There he undertook a number of peasant studies in preparation for his early masterpiece The Potato Eaters, painted in 1885.įrances Fowle, the senior curator for French art, said that the discovery – thought to be a first for any UK institution – added to our understanding of a crucial period in Van Gogh’s artistic development, when he first encountered the work of the French impressionists after moving to Paris in 1886, where he was supported by his brother Theo and met avant-garde artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard. “Lo and behold! We don’t see much of the peasant woman, but what we have is the lead white, the much heavier pigment he used for his face, showing up after the X-ray goes through the cardboard.”įurther research suggests that the painting is one of a series of experimental self-portraits – there are five similar works, displayed at the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands – painted on the back of earlier canvases from his time living in Nuenen, in the south of the country, from December 1883 to November 1885. The X-ray plates were processed in an old-fashioned darkroom, and when Stevenson looked at the images she realised she was staring at the face of Van Gogh himself. It was being X-rayed as part of a cataloguing exercise and in preparation for the Royal Scottish Academy’s summer exhibition of French impressionism – although Van Gogh was Dutch, he spent much of his artistic career in France. “We weren’t expecting much,” says Stevenson of the “modest little painting” that was donated in 1960 by an Edinburgh lawyer, Alexander Maitland. Photograph: Graeme Yule/National Galleries of Scotland Van Gogh self-portrait revealed by an X- ray of Head of a Peasant Woman, 1885.
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