The Hidden Van Gogh

In 2022, an X-ray revealed an unknown Van Gogh self-portrait on the back of a painting depicting a peasant woman. The face was hidden under layers of glue and cardboard for over a century. The discovery recalls an often-forgotten material reality: for a poor painter, canvas wasn't a neutral support but a costly resource, turned over, reused, and sometimes buried.

The painting Head of a Peasant Woman, painted by Van Gogh in 1885, belongs to the dark Nuenen period, before the Parisian and Provençal chromatic explosion. Preparing an exhibition, curators examined the work by X-ray and discovered, on the reverse, the silhouette of a bearded man wearing a scarf.

The image strongly corresponds to Van Gogh's self-portrait typology. It was hidden under a cardboard layer probably glued in the early 20th century to stabilize the support or present it more cleanly. This discovery isn't totally surprising in Van Gogh's case. The artist often lacked money and reused his supports. He sometimes painted on both sides of a canvas or covered older compositions.

Radiography here transforms a known work into a double object. On one side, the visible peasant woman belongs to a still earthy and socially harsh moment of his painting. On the other, the hidden self-portrait perhaps announces the period when Van Gogh explored his own face as a pictorial laboratory.

The problem is now technical. Removing the cardboard without damaging the visible work requires extreme caution. The self-portrait therefore exists for now mainly as a radiographic image, present but inaccessible, like an apparition locked in the painting's material structure.