An Art Institute of Chicago team decided to examine the painting more closely, in an attempt to better understand its complex layers of paint and areas where the painting appears to be wrinkled. To do so, they used X-ray and infrared imaging and, to their surprise, they saw a hidden drawing of “a pitcher, a mug, a rectangular object that may be a newspaper”.
The objects are resting on what appears to be a tabletop or seat of a chair, the team wrote in a paper published this week in the journal SN Applied Sciences.
Pablo Picasso is known to have periodically painted over previous works of art.
However, the artist usually painted directly over them and incorporated the previous work into the new work, the team wrote.
In this example, the discovered Picasso blocked-out the newfound drawing using a “thick white layer” of paint before painting the abstract piece.
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The team wrote: “This seems somewhat unusual in Picasso’s practice, as he often painted directly over earlier compositions, allowing underlying forms to show through and influence the final painting.”
As a result of Picasso’s blocking method, “no evidence of the earlier composition” can be seen from the surface of the abstract painting.
The experts refused to be drawn into the reasons why Picasso decided to cover-up the initial sketch.
But the team is convinced the hidden drawing is Picasso’s, noting how a similar work by the artist is now in the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden.
The result was intended to portray a painting closer to the perspective of the mind’s eye.
In addition to revealing the hidden drawing, the imaging uncovered earlier attempts at conservation and restoration using acrylic resin and a paint put into cracks in the surface.
This assisted modern-day conservation efforts, as the researchers were able to remove this resin and paint in the cracks to reveal the painting’s original colours.
2018 research revealed how Pablo Picasso painted one of his ‘Blue Period’ masterpieces, one showing a crouching, cloaked woman, on top of another artist’s work.
Examination of the painting, La Miséreuse Accroupie, translated as ‘The Crouching Beggar’, reveals Picasso painted over a landscape made by another artist, flipping the canvas 90 degrees and using what was once a clifftop as the line of the cloaked woman’s back.
Picasso, born in 1881, was one of the pioneers of Cubism, a style of art that depicts objects abstractly and from multiple points of view at once.
La Miséreuse Accroupie is a more realistic composition, showing a woman in a green cloak and blue dress crouching against a grey-blue background.