Secret hidden beneath painting's surface

     After a routine inspection of the Cincinnati Art Museum's prized Paul Cézanne painting "Still Life with Bread and Eggs", Serena Urry (chief conservator) noticed something odd. There were cracks concentrated in two specific areas revealing white paint, that contrasted with the French painter's so-called "dark" period. She asked a local medical company to bring portable X-ray and scan the painting. After stitching the pieces together and turning the final image sideways, she was shocked with what she'd found out. The X-ray scan revealed a figure resembling Cézanne himself. According to Serena- "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." Peter Jonathan Bell, the museum's curator of European paintings, sculpture and drawings says that they will "collaborate with Cézanne experts around the world to identify the sitter, and undertaking further imaging and technical analysis to help us understand what the portrait would have looked like and how it was made". Considering that the painting was there since 1955, it's really astonishing that it was hiding a secret hidden underneath, and it was just recently discovered.


https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/cezanne-cincinnati-art-museum/index.html

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