Pablo Picasso’s "Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto,” a 1901 oil painting, as seen by the naked eye. (Photo by Am Römerholz/Courtauld Institute of Art)
For more than a century, a portrait of a mystery woman lay hidden beneath a painting from Pablo Picasso’s famed Blue Period. Now, with the help of advanced imaging technology, conservators at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Britain have discovered the figure under the moody blues of the "Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto."
The work will be on display starting Friday at London’s Courtauld Gallery as part of "The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Goya to Impressionism. Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection.”
"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,” he added.
"Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto,”depicting Picasso’s Spanish sculptor friend,was painted in 1901 during the Blue Period, which marked a shift in Picasso’s visual language after the suicide of his close friend Carlos Casagemas.
In the top right corner of De Soto’s portrait, a 24-by-18-inch oil on canvas, is a depiction of Casagemas’s burial, the Courtauld Institute of Art said.
Infrared and X-ray images revealed the presence of a painting of an unidentifiedwoman, which the institute estimates to have been created a few months earlier. Her fashionable chignon hairstyle, shoulders and fingers are visible in the infrared image.
"The woman may have been a model, a friend or even a lover posing for one of Picasso’s colorful Impressionistic images of Parisian nightlife, or a melancholic woman seated in a bar,” the institute said.
She resembles images of seated women painted by Picasso the same year in "Absinthe Drinker” and "Woman with Crossed Arms,” the institute said. There is also evidence of another head lower down in the painting, it added.
Financial constraints often led artists to reuse and rework canvases. The latest discovery is significant, said Kenneth Brummel, the co-curator of an exhibition on Picasso’s Blue Period, because "it shows once again that Picasso, when he reused his supports, incorporated the forms of the underlying composition into the surface painting.”
"In both Portrait of Mateu Fernández De Soto’ and its underlying composition, the depicted figures rest their elbows on what appears in the infrared image to be a tabletop at the same level,” he wrote in an email.
Similar discoveries have come to light in other Picasso works in recent years. In 2021, a portrait of a nude, crouching woman was revealed under "The Blind Man’s Meal” using artificial intelligence. A scientific analysis of another Blue Period work, "The Soup,” displayed at the Phillips Collection in 2022, showed two layers of images under the final painting.
Brummel said the figure discovered underneath "Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto” is similar to the portrait of the unknown gentleman underneath "The Blue Room".
They "both depict closely cropped figures seated in a cafe concert, cabaret or theater environment who are rendered with thick contours, bold colors, flattened silhouettes, and rounded shoulders into which their heads are sunken,” he said.
Picasso was a "stylistic shape-shifter,” which helped to establish him as one of the giants of art history, said Wright of the Courtauld. "All that begins with a painting like this.”
