Hidden Portrait Discovered Behind Picasso Blue Period Painting
174Feb. 13, 2025
Conservators at London’sCourtauld Institute of Arthave uncovered beneath a Blue Period portrait of a man byPablo Picassoa painting of a woman, which the Spanish legend is believed to have completed months earlier. The melancholyPortrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto, depicting a sculptor friend of Picasso’s, was completed in the fall of 1901, shortly after the nineteen-year-old artist had moved from Spain to Paris. It is considered emblematic of Picasso’s Blue Period, which was spurred in part by the suicide of his good friend Carlos Casagemas and shows the painter leaving behind a vividly hued Impressionistic style in favor of a more somber mode.
Using X-rays and infrared imaging, conservators discovered a second figure beneath the paint, that of a woman, her hair worn in the style of chignon fashionable in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. The woman, whom researchers speculate may have been a model or an acquaintance of Picasso, recalls the seated female figures in other canvases Picasso painted that year, includingAbsinthe DrinkerandWoman with Crossed Arms. Traces of a second female head are visible farther down on the canvas, suggesting that the artist, in straitened financial circumstances, reworked the surface multiple times. Courtauld officials theorized that this second figure may have been painted in Picasso’s waning Impressionistic style, as embodied for example in hisWaitingmade earlier that year.
“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 in a statement. “You can even start to make out her shape just by looking at the painting with the naked eye.”
Curator Kenneth Brummel, who co-organized a 2022 exhibition of Picasso’s Blue Period paintings at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, told the Washington Post that the newly uncovered figure “shows once again that Picasso, when he reused his supports, incorporated the forms of the underlying composition into the surface painting.” Brummel pointed to the similarities in pose between the ghostly woman and the despondent male sitter, noting that “the depicted figures rest their elbows on what appears in the infrared image to be a tabletop at the same level.”
“This is truly a picture of great complexity, revealing its secrets over the years,” said Kerstin Richter, director of Winterthur, Switzerland’s Oskar Reinhart Collection, where the painting resides, noting that the discovery allowed art lovers to “visualize the artistic development process of the young painter layer by layer.”