Conservators at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London have uncovered a previously hidden image of a mystery woman beneath the surface of Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto (1901). This discovery was made using X-ray and infrared imaging of the painting, which dates to Picasso’s Blue Period, ahead of its inclusion in the upcoming exhibition “Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection.” The exhibition opens at the Courtauld Gallery on February 14th.
The analysis, conducted with the Oskar Reinhart Collection, revealed the figure of an unidentified woman with a chignon hairstyle in the upper right-hand corner of the painting. This, along with the suggestion of another hidden head elsewhere on the canvas, indicates that the painting was reworked multiple times—a common practice for Picasso during periods of financial constraint.
The visible portion of Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto depicts Picasso’s friend and sculptor Mateu Fernández de Soto, who came to Paris in late 1901 and shared a studio with Picasso. The portrait shows de Soto seated at a table, rendered in the somber tones that characterized Picasso’s Blue Period. The Blue Period marked a time of melancholy for the artist, sparked in part by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. In Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto, one of Picasso’s memorial paintings for Casagemas is visible on the wall behind the subject.
“We have long suspected another painting lay behind the portrait of de Soto because the surface of the work has telltale marks and textures of something below,” Barnaby Wright, deputy head of the Courtauld Gallery, said. “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.”
Picasso’s oeuvre includes many examples of reworked canvases. Similar discoveries have been made in other works from his Blue Period. In The Blue Room (1901), for example, infrared images have revealed a portrait of an unknown man beneath the iconic painting of a woman bathing.
“Specialist imaging technology such as that used by conservators at the Courtauld may allow us to see the hand of an artist to understand their creative process,” said Aviva Burnstock, professor of conservation at the Courtauld. “In revealing this previously hidden figure we can shed light on a pivotal moment in Picasso’s career.”
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