Van Gogh self-portrait found on reverse of another painting
Frances Fowle, the senior curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, got what was likely to be the most exciting text message of her career while waiting in line at a fish shop on a Friday afternoon.
It was an image from an X-ray. Not of broken bones — but of a previously unknown self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh.
“Look what I’ve discovered,” wrote her colleague Lesley Stevenson.
Stevenson, a conservator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, found the painting when she X-rayed another piece by Van Gogh, “Head of a Peasant Woman,” ahead of an exhibition — a routine step that normally does not reveal such a major find.
Hidden under layers of glue and cardboard was another painting on its reverse — a portrait of a man in a hat with a scarf tied around his throat.
“I saw it then and there: It was a self-portrait by
Van Gogh, on the back of our painting,” Fowle said.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has examined the X-ray of the newly uncovered painting, which is “almost certainly” a Van Gogh self-portrait, the National Galleries of Scotland said in a news release.
Still, experts are searching for ways to uncover it without damaging the painting under whose canvas it sits so they can confirm its authenticity.
Van Gogh was known to reuse canvasses because of lack of money, and Scottish conservators believe that was the case here.
Several other self-portraits from the Nuenen period — between 1883 and 1885, when Van Gogh lived in the southern Dutch town — have been discovered on the backs of his paintings and now hang in museums in the Netherlands and the United States.
Conservators suspect that, at some point, the self-portrait was covered up to make room for “Head of a Peasant Woman,” an 1885 study for a larger painting, “The Potato Eaters,” widely considered one of Van Gogh’s masterpieces.
It had been hiding in plain sight, inside a painting that had belonged to the National Galleries of Scotland for over 60 years.
Experts think the selfportrait was covered up with cardboard around 1905, “when the Peasant Woman was lent to an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,” according to a news release.
“At this date the Peasant Woman was evidently considered more ‘finished’ than the Van Gogh selfportrait,”
it added.
“Head of a Peasant Woman” changed hands several times in the years following, until it was acquired by private collectors in Scotland and given to the National Galleries in 1960.
“Knowing that [the newly uncovered selfportrait is] there — in a painting that’s in the National Galleries of Scotland, in a collection that belongs to the people of Scotland — is incredibly important and significant,” Stevenson said. “Hopefully, it will encourage people to come and have a look.”
The National Galleries of Scotland already own three works by Van Gogh, painted between 1885 and 1889 — “and then suddenly, we have potentially another, which is probably the most exciting one of all,” Fowle said in the series of interviews released Thursday by the public art body.
This kind of “major” discovery “happens once, twice in a conservator’s lifetime,” Stevenson said.