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For more than 120 years, the image of the peasant woman lay undiscovered. Her creator, the Dutch master Vincent van Gogh, must have assumed she would be hidden forever.
However, now a remarkable new X-ray technique, using a particle accelerator, has recovered her image – which Van Gogh painted over with his 1887 landscape Patch of Grass – in remarkable detail. An international group of scientists applied the process, known as "X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy", for the first time ever on a painting to recover the original portrait.
Art researchers had previously been aware of the woman's existence. However, the technological limitations of existing methods, including standard X-ray and infrared, meant that only the outlines of the head could be detected.
The new technique can differentiate between the colour pigments, revealing not only the strokes but the original colours used.
Van Gogh's need to recycle his canvases because of poverty has led scholars to believe there are other similar hidden examples of his work: experts estimate that around one third of his works were painted over.
2 comments:
Amazing - and stunning - face.
Thanks! I am reading a new book about Van Gogh and Gauguin coexisting in a crowded studio in Arles France and painting on treated jute. They had opposite styles and temperaments and at night unwound (?) with absinthe and hookers.
So this is really fascinating what you've posted. I have rather a Van Gogh obsession and I did once see the entire Gauguin retrospective exhibit with a friend whose father worked for the world bank so she lived in Tahiti in high school - at the exhibit she saw the original of the painting by Gauguin that she had on her bedroom wall in Tahiti so it was a thril to be with her there!
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