Edward Johnson
HUM 110-IT1
November 4, 2012
Paintings on Paintings on Paintings
The Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh struggled as a painter. His frustration often caused him to destroy certain parts of his works. He became renowned as a mad genius that cut off his own ear and for his revolutionary experiments with form and color. Van Gogh was a very productive painter. He painted well over 800 paintings. Interestingly, there is actually much more of his work that we don’t know of. It’s estimated that almost a third of his existing paintings have another painting hidden a few millimeters below the surface. He was a modern artist who rejected the classical techniques of the Salon Painters (his Academic contemporaries of the 19th century). He was overwhelmed by a passion to craft new forms in his images.
Van Gogh’s vibrant painting titled “Patch of Grass” was studied intensely for years in the conservation studio of the Kroller-Muller museum in the Netherlands. Thanks to the damages of time, the color of a human cheek is visible in one of the larger cracks of the painting’s surface. Scientists and conservators began to collaborate, knowing from x-rays that there was a mysterious head of a woman underneath the surface layer of the field of flowers.
The Kroller-Muller museum allowed the scientists to take Van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass” was taken to an atomic particle accelerator in Hamburg, Germany, known as the Doris III Synchrotron, to map the pattern of hidden brushstrokes. For over a week, a thin beam scanned the painting to detect the fluorescence given off by each chemical in the layers of pigments.
With the data collected from the experiment a virtual three-dimensional model was created that allowed the scientists to peel off, digitally, all of the pigment layers to get to the lead white priming layer which Van Gogh had used to eliminate the head of a