Paintings Hidden Under Other Paintings: 12 Discoveries
Under a surprising number of famous paintings there is another painting. Sometimes the artist changed their mind, sometimes they reused an expensive canvas, and sometimes they painted over a portrait of somebody they had fallen out with. X ray and infrared imaging now find these hidden pictures routinely.
What the scans keep finding
A Picasso from the Blue Period hides a portrait of a bow tied man, found by X ray in 1992 and imaged in colour in 2014.
A Van Gogh grass field hides the head of a peasant woman.
A Vermeer hid a large Cupid on the back wall, painted out by someone else after his death and uncovered in 2021.
Under a Goya portrait there is a different sitter facing the other way.
And canvas was expensive, which explains more of these than genius ever will.
1 | The Blue Room, Pablo Picasso (1901)
A woman bathing, and beneath her a bearded man in a bow tie with his chin on his hand. Conservators saw a shape in a 1954 examination, confirmed it by X ray in 1992, and produced a colour reconstruction in 2014.
Picasso was broke in 1901 and reused the canvas within months. More on him in Pablo Picasso.
2 | Patch of Grass, Vincent van Gogh (1887)
X ray fluorescence scanning in 2008 recovered the head of a peasant woman under the grass, in colour, from the metal pigments still sitting in the lower layer.
Around a third of his early canvases carry an earlier picture. More on him in Vincent van Gogh.
3 | Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Vermeer (around 1658)
A large painting of Cupid hung on the back wall. It was known from X rays since 1979, and long assumed to be Vermeer’s own change of mind. Analysis showed the overpaint came decades after his death, and it was removed by 2021.
More on him in Vermeer.
4 | Portrait of Don Ramon Satue, Francisco Goya (1823)
Scanning at the Rijksmuseum in 2011 found a uniformed figure with medals underneath, facing the other way, most likely a Bonapartist general Goya thought better of showing.
More on him in Francisco Goya.
5 | Old Man in Military Costume, Rembrandt
The Getty and Los Angeles conservators recovered a second head under this one, wearing a different hat, using synchrotron based scanning.
Rembrandt reused panels constantly. More on him in Rembrandt.
6 | Pentimento, the word for it
Pentimento is Italian for repentance. It names the change of mind that becomes visible when the upper paint thins with age and the earlier version starts to show through.
The term is explained in what is pentimento.
7 | The Arnolfini Portrait and the moving feet
Infrared reflectography shows van Eyck moved the man’s right hand, the woman’s face and the position of the feet before settling. The underdrawing does not match the finished panel.
More on him in Jan van Eyck.
8 | How the scans actually work
X ray shows dense pigments like lead white. Infrared passes through many upper layers to reveal carbon underdrawing. X ray fluorescence maps individual elements, which is how a buried head can be given back its colours.
None of it touches the painting.
9 | The Old Guitarist and the woman’s face
Look at the guitarist’s neck in raking light and you can see a woman’s face, upside down and reused, without any equipment at all.
It is the easiest hidden painting in the world to spot in person.
10 | Why they reused canvas
Prepared canvas and panel were among the largest costs a working painter had. Scraping back and repainting was normal practice, not a confession.
The romance of the hidden picture is mostly a story about money.
11 | What conservators will not do
A buried picture is almost never uncovered, because removing the top layer destroys the finished work. Vermeer’s Cupid was an exception only because the overpaint was proved to be a later hand.
The rule is simple: reveal what the artist did not paint, keep what they did.
12 | Where this is going
Scanning is now cheap enough that whole collections are being imaged, and the finds have moved from famous single pictures to entire bodies of work.
Expect the number of known hidden paintings to keep rising.
Hidden paintings, common questions
How do they find a painting under a painting? X ray for dense pigments, infrared for carbon underdrawing, and X ray fluorescence to map individual elements and rebuild the buried colours.
What is hidden under Picasso’s Blue Room? A portrait of a bearded man in a bow tie, seen by X ray in 1992 and reconstructed in colour in 2014.
Was Vermeer’s Cupid uncovered? Yes. Analysis showed the overpaint was applied decades after his death, so it was removed, and the picture was shown with the Cupid restored in 2021.
Why did painters reuse canvas? Prepared canvas and panel were expensive. Reusing a support was routine, especially early in a career.
Where can I see the results? The Phillips Collection for the Blue Room, the Van Gogh Museum, the Gemaldegalerie in Dresden for the Vermeer, the Rijksmuseum for the Goya.
The line that stays with me: pentimento means repentance. Every painter who scraped back a canvas left a confession that nobody could read for four hundred years, and now a machine reads it in an afternoon.
More on these techniques sits at the Met and the Rijksmuseum.