Cover news reporter Yan Wenwen
Scottish National Gallery's blockbuster exhibition "Taste of Impressionism" will open on July 30, and the collection "The Head of a Peasant Woman" will be exhibited as a blockbuster photo. In preparation, experts scanned the painting with X-rays and found that on the back of the canvas was a self-portrait of Van Gogh, most likely hidden.
A self-portrait of Van Gogh hidden on the back of The Peasant Woman's Head
The Head of the Peasant Woman
According to a statement released by the National Gallery of Scotland, this self-portrait of Van Gogh is hidden on the back of Van Gogh's early work", "The Head of the Peasant Woman", covered with glue and cardboard.
The Head of the Peasant Woman was created in 1885, because Van Gogh was living in a small town in the south of the Netherlands, and this painting should have been created while he was living in the south of the Netherlands.
A scanned self-portrait behind The Peasant Woman's Head
X-ray scans show that in the self-portrait, Van Gogh wears a beard, a brimmed hat, and a scarf around his neck. The whole picture is similar to van Gogh's later paintings such as "Self-Portrait with Straw Hat" and "Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat" in Van Gogh's later paintings.
Self-Portrait in a Grey Felt Hat
After the self-portrait was created in 1885, it was quietly preserved after the Head of the Peasant Woman, and was not found by X-rays until 137 years later.
During Van Gogh's lifetime, the painting was not sold until 15 years after his death, when it was lent to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Subsequently, the painting changed hands several times and was acquired by Evelyn Fleming in 1923, whose son Ian was the creator of the famous James Bond.
In 1951, a couple of lawyers in Edinburgh collected the painting, and nine years later they donated it to the National Gallery of Scotland. Experts at the museum currently say it may be possible to remove hidden self-portraits, but the process of removing glue and cardboard requires meticulous work, and they are working on how to do this without harming the Head of the Peasant Woman.
Van Gogh's self-portraits are valuable in the art market, and the most expensive one, "Beardless Self-Portraits", once sold for $71.5 million, and it would be a great joy if the National Gallery of Scotland could strip the painting.
X-rays were used to find unfinished paintings from Van Gogh's books
In fact, this is not the first time that experts have found another painting on the back of Van Gogh's painting. The common saying is that Van Gogh was poor in his life, so he often reused the canvas, so it is likely that after painting the self-portrait, he turned the canvas over and then completed the "Head of the Peasant Woman" on the back. However, some experts say that many painters will also reuse canvases in order to control the number of their paintings.
"Pasture Flower Field and Rose Still Life"
In 2012, a museum in the Netherlands scanned Van Gogh's painting Still Life of a Ranch Flower And Rose and found it covered with portraits of two wrestlers. Combined with the information from Van Gogh's family letters at that time, the researchers concluded that this was Van Gogh's work.
In 1886, van Gogh came to Antwerp, Belgium, to study, and he wrote a letter to his brother Theo, saying that he needed a large canvas, a new pen and paint. Theo bought these items for Van Gogh, and some time later, Van Gogh wrote to his brother that he had drawn two wrestlers.
A wrestler under the cover of Ranch Flower Field and Rose Still Life
However, although there are family letters as evidence, no one has ever found a painting of Van Gogh's wrestler, and it is generally believed that the painting may have been destroyed because Van Gogh himself was not satisfied, and it turned out that he had painted a new theme on the painting, "Pasture Flower Field and Rose Still Life".
Interestingly, Van Gogh's treatment of the painting "Pasture Flower Field and Rose Still Life" is to place the signature in the upper right corner of the canvas, which is inconsistent with his usual style, so many people think that this painting is a fake. It was not until 2012 that the canvas was examined by a new X-ray scanning technique that it was confirmed that the painting was the work of the Dutch Impressionist artist.
X-ray scanning has become an important means of identifying authenticity
X-rays not only helped experts find Van Gogh paintings hidden behind the canvas, but also helped experts confirm Van Gogh's authenticity.
In 2013, the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands publicly displayed a newly discovered Van Gogh painting, The Sunset of Montmartre, which has long been considered a fake. Sunsets in Montmartre was owned by Van Gogh's brother Theo in 1890, and he sold the paintings in 1901. Around 1908, the Norwegian industrialist Musta bought the painting. Musta then showed it to a French diplomat, who asserted that the work was either a fake or had been created by another artist in the name of Van Gogh. Since then, the painting has been considered a fake.
Until 2013, after two years of analysis, the painting was finally identified as Van Gogh's authentic handwriting, one of the important reasons is the use of X-ray scanning of the canvas of the oil painting, after imaging, the computer is used to count the density of the canvas weaving, analyze the horizontal and vertical arrangement of the weaving, and compare with the X-ray imaging of Van Gogh's authentic canvas. The analysis shows that the canvas of the oil painting "The Sunset of Montmartre" is strikingly similar to the canvas of Van Gogh's "Rock" in the Houston Museum of Art. Based on this result and in conjunction with other conventional artistic appraisal techniques, The Sunset of Montmartre was identified as Van Gogh's original work.
In fact, X-rays were used for painting identification when they were first discovered. In 1896, a Chinese businessman in Frankfurt, Germany, scanned an oil painting for identification, which was the first recorded identification of an X-ray painting, and it should be known that X-rays were only discovered by Roentgen a year ago.
In recent years, X-ray scanning has gradually become a common method of art identification, which can obtain deeper and more comprehensive information than the previously used infrared and ultraviolet imaging techniques, such as the nature and origin of the paper, trace minerals and other elements in the pigment, and the preparatory sketch under the finished product, so as to trace the clues and locations of the painting at the time of implementation.
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