Twelve famous paintings hide an earlier picture under the one on view. Beneath Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window stands a Cupid, beneath a Goya portrait an officer in uniform, and beneath a Seurat the painter's own reflection.
Some were covered for decades, others for centuries. Bringing them back took X-rays, infrared light and particle beams, and in one case the buried image changes what the visible one means.
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How These Were Chosen
A hidden painting is an image that survives beneath the paint of a finished work. Usually the artist covered it, to save a canvas or after a change of mind. Now and then another hand did it, sometimes long after the artist had finished.
Such images can be recovered because paints differ in what they are made of, and each kind reacts in its own way to light and radiation.
Pigments heavy with metal, such as lead white, stop X-rays and show up pale on the film. Infrared light passes through many top layers. Scanners go further and map the metals of each pigment point by point, which shows where each color lies.
Every hidden image chosen has been seen and drawn, not just suspected, and its discovery tells something new about the work or its maker. The ranking, from last place to first, weighs how well known the visible painting is against how much the hidden one changes it.
12. Paul Gauguin, Poèmes Barbares (1896)
In Poèmes Barbares (Barbarian Poems), painted in Tahiti in 1896 by the French artist Paul Gauguin, a woman with two blue wings fills the tall canvas, her right hand raised in blessing. At the lower left sits a small, childlike Ta'aroa, the creator god of Tahitian myth.
Beneath her lies an older picture, painted when the canvas was held the other way, wider than tall: a landscape with riders on galloping horses.
Those riders stayed hidden until the Harvard Art Museums, which own the canvas, closed for a renovation that ran from 2008 to 2014. With the collection in storage, the museums' conservators could study the paintings at leisure.
In 2012 they saw that the X-ray of this one did not match its surface. On the film, the pale marks left by dense paints such as vermilion, a bright red made from mercury, traced a different picture.
At first those shapes made no sense, because the team was looking at them upright. Once the film was turned 90 degrees counterclockwise, the blurs became trees or clouds, and among them one of the conservators picked out two small riders on horseback in the middle distance.
Seen that way, the film read as a landscape. Gauguin had painted the scene first, then rotated his canvas a quarter turn and covered it.
Why he gave up the horsemen is not recorded. Gauguin was often short of supplies in Tahiti, and an old canvas turned upright could carry a new picture. The colors of the landscape are known only in part, so the museum could draw no more than a rough sketch of it.
At a Glance
Artist: Paul Gauguin (1848 to 1903), French
Painted: 1896
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 64.8 × 48.3 cm (25.5 × 19 in)
Where to see it: Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Level 1, Room 1220)
11. Francisco Goya, Portrait of Don Ramón Satué (1823)
In 1823, five years before his death, the Spanish court painter Francisco de Goya painted his Portrait of Don Ramón Satué. The judge stands with his hands in his pockets and his white shirt open at the collar.
Goya gave him a looseness he usually kept for his closest friends, and for close to two centuries Goya's Portrait of Don Ramón Satué was taken for a friendly likeness of a judge and nothing more. Then, in 2011, a scan showed that Satué was not alone on the canvas.