Head of a Peasant Woman, a painting from an earlier period in Vincent van Gogh’s career, depicts a local woman from a town in the south of the Netherlands. It’s there — where Van Gogh lived from 1883 to 1885 — that he carefully immortalized her facial features and simple clothes in oil paints.
But on the flip side of the work, hidden behind layers of glue and cardboard, is another painting: a bearded man in a brimmed hat and loose handkerchief. His stare is unyielding and although the right side of his face is in shadow, his left ear is clearly visible.
Art conservators at the National Galleries of Scotland discovered the mysterious image in July using X-rays, as part of a routine examination. They speculate that Van Gogh, who often reused his canvases to save money, created the work after Head of a Peasant Woman; instead of painting over earlier works, like some painters, he would flip the canvas over and work on the reverse. It is likely that this is the impressionist artist’s oldest self-portrait yet known.
“[This is] an amazing — potentially truly groundbreaking — discovery, because now a whole generation of art historians will need to figure out how this new self-portrait fits within the canon,” says Francesca Casadio, a founder of the scientific research laboratory at the Art Institute of Chicago who was not involved in the work.
