Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh was never known for his sense of humour.
In fact, he severed a part of his own left ear with a razor and was generally considered a madman.
Yet he clearly had a sense of mischief or humour as a routine x-ray of his painting, Head of a Peasant Woman, before an upcoming exhibition revealed a self-portrait of the painter beneath the canvas.
“It was absolutely thrilling,” Lesley Stevenson, senior paintings conservator at the National Galleries of Scotland, told The Guardian.
“Lo and behold! We don’t see much of the peasant woman, but what we have is the lead white, the much heavier pigment he used for his face, showing up after the X-ray goes through the cardboard.”
The “modest little painting” was donated by an Edinburgh lawyer, Alexander Maitland, in 1960.
Any van Gogh enthusiast will be aware it is one of a series of experimental self-portraits by the artist.
There are five similar self-portraits behind his works on show at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The Head of a Peasant Woman was being x-rayed as a cataloguing exercise and in readiness for the Royal Scottish Academy’s summer exhibition of French impressionism. Van Gogh qualified as he spent most of his adult life in France.
