The most studied period of Pablo Picasso’s career, it seems, still had a secret to keep: a mystery woman hidden beneath a well-known portrait, now revealed by conservators at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
X-ray and infrared analysis were conducted on Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto (1901), a depiction of a Spanish sculptor who befriended Picasso during his Blue Period, a stylistically pivotal though melancholic moment in the painter’s early oeuvre.
Over the course of three years, Picasso diverged from painting convention, utilizing expressive brushwork and a now famously moody blue-green palette. His Blue Period paintings have become widely popular and are now the subject of a wealth of scholarship.
Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto is particularly well known, given its age and composition. It contains an ode to the friend and artist whose suicide plunged Picasso into despondency.
The Courtauld findings suggest that Mateu Fernández de Soto wasn’t the planned subject of the canvas, as the newly discovered figure of the woman was likely painted only a few months earlier. Her hair is twisted into the chignon hairstyle favored by chic Parisians of the time, bearing her a resemblance to the sitters of several portraits made by Picasso that year, including as Absinthe Drinker (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg) and Woman with Crossed Arms (Kunstmuseum Basel). The Courtauld added that the painting evidently went under several revisions, and may have been painted in the vibrant, Impressionistic style that preceded the Blue Period.
“Further research into the painting and detailed analysis could reveal more about the mystery woman, but it is not certain her identity will be established. 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 in a statement.
Barnaby Wright, deputy head of the gallery, added in her own statement that experts had previously suspected that another painting lay beneath the de Soto’s likeness, given the paint’s marks and textures.
“Now we know that this is the figure of a woman. You can even start to make out her shape just by looking at the painting with the naked eye,” she said, adding, “Picasso’s way of working to transform one image into another and to be a stylistic shapeshifter would become a defining feature of his art, which helped to make him one of the giant figures of art history. All that begins with a painting like this.”
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