In Picasso's 'Blue Period', scanners find secrets he painted over

Using tools originally developed for medicine and geology, the researchers peered through the canvas without damaging it

Bits of colour were peeking out through cracks in the dark shades of La Miséreuse accroupie, a 1902 painting by a young Pablo Picasso during his “Blue Period.”

That was not surprising. X-ray images taken a quarter- century ago had shown that Picasso had painted this work, known in English as The Crouching Woman over another artist’s landscape.

Sandra Webster-Cook, a conservator of paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, which owns the painting, also observed textures of the brush strokes that seemed neither to reflect Picasso’s composition nor the underlying landscape. “It was clear there was something