For an art work courting again to 1865, the looks of small cracks was no shock.
But they have been concentrated in two particular areas, reasonably than distributed evenly throughout the canvas.
What’s extra, they revealed tiny flashes of white that stood out in distinction to the brooding palette of the French painter’s so-called “dark” interval.
“I thought there might be something underneath that we should look at,” Urry stated in a video interview.
The conservator requested a neighborhood medical firm to carry a transportable X-ray machine to the museum, the place a technician scanned the 76cm-wide oil portray in a number of components.
As Urry stitched the sequence of pictures collectively digitally utilizing Photoshop, she noticed “blotches of white” that indicated the presence of extra white lead pigment.
“I was trying to figure out what the heck they were… then I just turned it (90 degrees),” she recalled.
“I was all alone but I think I said ‘wow’ out loud.”
When the scan was rotated vertically, a picture of a person emerged, his eyes, hairline and shoulders showing as darkish patches.
Given the determine’s physique place, Urry and her museum colleagues consider it to be Cézanne himself.
“I think everyone’s opinion is that it’s a self-portrait … He’s posed in the way a self-portrait would be: in other words, he’s looking at us, but his body is turned.
“If it have been a portrait of somebody apart from himself, it might most likely be full frontal,” she added.
Should that be the case, it would be among the earliest recorded depictions of the painter, who was in his mid-20s when the still life was completed.
Cézanne is known to have produced more than two dozen self-portraits, though almost all of them were completed after the 1860s and were largely executed in pencil.
“We are on the outset of the method of discovering as a lot as we will in regards to the portrait,” said Peter Jonathan Bell, the museum’s curator of European paintings, sculpture and drawings, over email.
“This will embody collaborating with Cézanne specialists around the globe to establish the sitter, and endeavor additional imaging and technical evaluation to assist us perceive what the portrait would have appeared like and the way it was made.
“Stitched together, this information may add to our understanding of a formative moment in the early career of this great artist.”
Part of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s assortment since 1955, Still Life with Bread and Eggs was painted in a realist fashion — impressed by the Spanish and Flemish Baroque intervals — that Cézanne deployed early in his profession.
He later developed a extra vibrant aesthetic below the steering of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, earlier than spearheading the extra structured fashion of the post-Impressionist motion.
In the mid-1860s, Cézanne was growing a brand new coarse portray approach, usually utilizing a palette knife to use color.
But whether or not his hidden portrait was an experiment gone mistaken, or whether or not he merely reused an outdated canvas to economize, stays a matter of hypothesis.
Another chance, Urry ventured, is that the painter immediately felt impressed and “needed a canvas” — a concept supported by the truth that he seems to not have eliminated a lot paint earlier than beginning work.
“It’s pretty clear that he didn’t scrape it down,” Urry defined.
Many different questions stay, together with the colors Cézanne used and the way full his unique portrait was.
Museum specialists hope to analyse the portray utilizing superior scanning processes like multispectral imaging, which could reveal the underlying brushwork by assessing textures invisible to the human eye.
X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, in the meantime, might reveal which chemical components are current and, thus, what colored pigments have been utilized by the artist.
“We’re hoping to reach out to colleagues in the conservation and curatorial worlds to see if we can get access to other equipment,” Urry stated.
For now, nevertheless, the museum is trying ahead to placing Still Life with Bread and Eggs again on show.
Since making the invention in May, Urry has cleaned the portray and thinned the varnish on its floor.
It returns to public view, alongside a picture of the X-ray, from December 20.
Further scans and evaluation might entail transporting the art work to a different establishment, presenting logistical challenges and that means guests to the museum may miss out on an opportunity to see considered one of solely two — or arguably, now, three — Cézannes in its assortment.
“You can’t just pop it in your car and drive it to Chicago,” Urry stated.
“The portrait has been there since he painted it, and it’s been there since (we acquired it in) 1955,” she added, “so there’s no rush.”
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