Researchers at the National Galleries of Scotland have discovered what is almost certainly “a previously unknown self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh”, A routine X-ray scan of the painting Head of a Peasant Woman (1884-5), done as part of a cataloguing exercise, revealed the familiar outline of a man, wearing a scarf tied around his throat, hidden deep “under layers of glue and cardboard”. Frances Fowle, the senior curator at the Edinburgh museum, believes that the image is a self-portrait, a view supported by Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. It is thought that the artist painted the image while living in the town of Nuenen, in the Netherlands, between 1883 and 1885, when he frequently reused canvases in order to save money. Several “hidden” works by van Gogh have been discovered on other canvases dating from the same period.
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