The surprise came one Friday afternoon, when conservatives from the Scottish National Galleries they found a unpublished self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh, with a beard and a wide-brimmed hat and a scarf tied around his neck, which has been hidden on the back of one of his paintings for more than a century, according to ‘The Guardian’. “It was absolutely thrilling,” Lesley Stevenson, Senior Curator of Paintings at the National Galleries of Scotland, tells the British newspaper of the moment a routine X-ray of a Van Gogh painting ‘Head of a Peasant’ revealed this extraordinary find in the back of the canvas, hidden for more than 100 years. The artist often reused the canvases to save money by turning them over and then working on the other side.
The chief curator of the National Galleries of Scotland, in Edinburgh, Lesley Stevenson, with Van Gogh’s ‘Peasant’s Head’ in her hands and next to an X-ray image of a self-portrait of the Dutch painter hidden on the back of the canvas
“We weren’t expecting much,” Stevenson says of the “unassuming little painting” that was presented as a gift in 1960 by an Edinburgh barrister, Alexander Maitland. It was being X-rayed as part of the cataloging of the collection and in preparation for the Royal Scottish Academy’s Summer Exhibition of French Impressionism.
Further investigation suggests that the painting is part of a series of experimental self-portraits (there are five similar works, exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam) painted on the back of canvases made in Nuenen, in the south of the country, from December 1883 to November. 1885. There he made a series of preparatory studies of peasants for his first masterpiece, “The Potato Eaters” from 1885.
Back of Van Gogh’s ‘Peasant Portrait’. Hidden under layers of cardboard and glue, a self-portrait of the artist has been discovered
Conservators will now begin the process of unveiling the self-portrait, which is in an uncertain condition. under layers of adhesive and cardboard, preserving the original painting. “It’s like stepping into the unknown,” Stevenson said. “The challenge will be removing the adhesive from the oil paint layers, taking advantage of the difference in solubility between animal-based glue and oil-based paint.” Some 15 years after his death, ‘Peasant’s Head’ was loaned for an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It would have been during this loan that the canvas was glued to cardboard before being framed. The painting of the peasant woman would have been considered more “finished” than the self-portrait on the other side, explains the BBC.
The painting changed hands several times and in 1923 it was acquired by Evelyn St Croix Fleming, whose son Ian created the character of James Bond. The painting arrived in Scotland in 1951, having entered the collection of Alexander and Rosalind Maitland, who later donated it to the National Galleries of Scotland. According to museum specialists, it is possible to reveal the hidden self-portrait, but the process of removing the glue and cardboard required delicate conservation work. Research is underway to find out how this can be done without damaging the paint on the front. Visitors to an exhibition in Edinburgh will be able to see the X-ray image for the first time through a specially created light box.