Hidden Picasso portrait found beneath 124-year-old painting
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Left: An infrared image of "Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto," revealing another portrait underneath. Right, Pablo Picasso's painting "Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto." Photos: The Courtauld Institute of Art
One of Pablo Picasso's earliest Blue Period paintings contains another portrait hidden beneath its surface, specialist imaging technology has revealed.
The big picture: The artwork of the mystery woman was discovered when Courtauld Institute of Art conservators "took x-ray and infrared images of Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto — a portrait depicting Picasso's sculptor friend painted in 1901," per a statement this week from the specialist college at the University of London, U.K.
Driving the news: Conservators were examining the painting ahead of its display at "The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition," which starts Friday at the Sammlung Oskar Reinhart Am Römerholz Museum in Winterthur, Switzerland, when they found the portrait.
- They hope further research into the painting and detailed analysis might help uncover the identity of the woman.
- "She may have been a model, a friend or even a lover posing for one of Picasso's colorful Impressionistic images of Parisian nightlife, or a melancholic woman seated in a bar," the Courtauld said.
Zoom in: "Picasso often reused his canvases at this time because he did not have much money," the Courtauld noted.
- "However, he also embraced the process of painting one work over another, resisting whitewashing old images in favour of beginning a new figure directly on top of an earlier one. It is as if the portrait of de Soto grew out of the figure of the woman below as one style gave way to another."
Flashback: Picasso said in 1957 that x-ray technology might one day reveal a hidden work in one of his earliest paintings, and that came true in 2018 when it revealed hidden artwork beneath another one of his Blue Period paintings.
Go deeper: Researchers find new details in hidden portraits beneath Picasso's paintings
