The 1902 oil painting La Misereuse accroupie (The Crouching Woman) is a major work from the Picassos Blue Period.
The painting is owned by the the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Canada, and the knowledge of an underlying landscape was revealed long ago by X-ray radiography.
Researchers from the Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS) and the National Gallery of Art in the US used non-invasive portable imaging techniques to detail buried images in works by Picasso
Our international team - consisting of scientists, a curator and a conservator - has begun to tease apart the complexity of La Misereuse accroupie, uncovering subtle changes made by Picasso as he worked toward his final vision," said Walton.
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Researchers found that Picasso painted over another painter's work after rotating it 90 degrees to the right, using some of the landscape forms in his own final composition of La Misereuse accroupie.
Picasso incorporated the lines of the cliff edges into the woman's back, for example.
By closely observing La Misereuse accroupie, researchers observed distinct textures and contrasting underlying colour that peaked through the crack lines and did not match the visible composition.
X-ray radiography was the first non-invasive tool used to uncover hidden information in La Misereuse accroupie; it revealed a horizontal landscape by a different Barcelona painter, whose identity remains unknown, under the visible surface of Picassos painting.
John Delaney, senior imaging scientist at the National Gallery of Art, then studied the painting with infrared reflectance hyperspectral imaging, which records underlying images depending on their relative transparency of the paint layers.
For a more detailed understanding of the repositioned arm, scientists next investigated the painting using images generated by their X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanner.
This system produces greyscale images showing the distribution of elements associated with various pigments of the painting.
The scientists were able to analyse 70 per cent of the painting in 24 hours.
Together with micro-samples extracted from strategic locations, the XRF results, along with further images generated by Delaney from the hyperspectral reflectance, reveal the steps of creation taken by Picasso.