Hidden Picasso Sketch Found Under One of His Most Famous Paintings

A secret Pablo Picasso sketch has been discovered underneath his abstract painting Still Life. The piece of art is one of Picasso’s most well-known, but nobody ever knew about the hidden sketch until just now. A team from the Art Institute of Chicago were doing some in-depth analysis of the painting, looking at layers of paint and examining some perceived wrinkles. This led them to use X-ray and infrared imaging, which is how the hidden sketch was found.

The recently discovered Pablo Picasso sketch features “a pitcher, a mug, a rectangular object that may be a newspaper,” which is propped up on what appears to be a chair. It is not out of the ordinary for artists to reuse canvas when painting and Picasso frequently did this throughout his career. However, normally, the artist would just paint directly over his sketches when getting to work on new pieces of art. This would allow some of the original sketch to be included in the final piece.

Researchers discovered that Pablo Picasso painted over the sketch with a thick layer of white paint, which blocked out the piece to begin on Still Life. “This seems somewhat unusual in Picasso’s practice, as he often painted directly over earlier compositions, allowing underlying forms to show through and influence the final painting,” the research team wrote in their paper. Since the sketch was blocked out, there was no evidence that it ever existed until now. As for why it was blocked out, Picasso might not have been satisfied with the results and probably didn’t want to waste a perfectly good canvas.

While the research team did not speculate about why Pablo Picasso blocked out the original sketch, they are confident that it was done by him as it looks very similar to a lot of other sketches by the artist. Most of the similar sketches can be found at the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden. In addition to discovering the hidden sketch, the X-ray and infrared imaging was also able to show where restoration efforts had taken place, including adding resin and paint into cracks. They were able to remove the resin and added paint, which gave them better clues as to the original coloring and will help with further restoration.

Pablo Picasso’s Still Life has a date of February 4th, 1922, which suggests that it was done around that time. The piece was done during Picasso’s linear or Cubist phase, from late 1921 to 1922, where he would paint different 3D objects from different points of view in order to construct a painting that was closer to the mind’s eye view. He later gave the Still Life painting to Gertrude Stein. You can read the entire research paper on the hidden Pablo Picasso drawing over at Spinger. You can also check out the secret image below.