The Universities of Delft and Antwerp, working with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Hamburg and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, have announced spectacular results in making an overpainted head beneath a van Gogh landscape in the Kröller-Müller Museum visible to the eye.
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| PRESS RELEASE – Persbericht in het Nederlands | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Looking through Van Gogh | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Advanced X-ray analysis reveals a portrait below the painting of a landscape | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A new technique allows pictures which were later painted over to be revealed once more in unprecedented detail. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| An international research team, including members from the Technical University of Delft (NL) and the University of Antwerp (B) has successfully applied this technique for the first time to the painting entitled Grasgrond (Patch of grass) by Vincent van Gogh. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Behind this painting is the portrait of a woman. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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It is well-known that Vincent van Gogh often painted over his older works. Experts estimate that about thirty percent of his paintings conceal other compositions under them. A new technique, based on synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, reveals this type of hidden painting. |
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| The techniques usually employed to reveal concealed layers of paintings, such as conventional X-ray radiography and Infra-red reflectography, have their limitations. Together with experts from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg and the Kröller-Müller Museum, TU Delft materials expert and art historian Dr Joris Dik and University of Antwerp chemistry professor Koen Janssens therefore chose to adopt a different approach. The painting is subjected to an X-ray beam from a synchrotron radiation source, and the fluorescence of the layers of paint is measured. This technique has the major advantage that the measured fluorescence is specific to each chemical element. Each type of atom (e.g. lead or mercury) and also individual paint pigments can therefore be charted individually. The benefit of using synchrotron radiation of high energy is that it is strongly penetrating so that element specific analysis well below the visible surface becomes possible. The upper layers of paint distort the measurements only to a small degree. Moreover, the speed of measurement is high, which allows relatively large areas to be visualised. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Patch of Grass This method was applied to a painting by Vincent van Gogh. The work in question, Grasgrond, was painted by Van Gogh in Paris in 1887 and is owned by the Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, The Netherlands). Previous research had already discovered the vague outline of a head behind the painting. It was scanned at the synchrotron radiation source DORIS at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg using an intense but small X-ray beam. Over the course of two days, the area covering the image of a woman’s head was scanned, measuring 17.5 x 17.5 cm. |
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The measurements enabled researchers to reconstruct the concealed painting in unparalleled detail. In particular the combination of the distribution of the elements mercury and antimony (from specific paint pigments) provided a ‘colour photo’ of the portrait which had been painted over. |
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Press release by TU Delft, NL |
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