Top Image: An X-ray showing the hidden painting Image: nationalgalleries.org
A previously unknown self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh was recently discovered on the back of another of his paintings after being hidden behind glue and cardboard for more than 100 years!
The STRIKING and mysterious image was discovered when art conservators at the National Galleries of Scotland were examining Van Gogh’s Head of a Peasant Woman for an upcoming exhibition. They took an X-ray of the painting and found the striking image of the artist’s intense stare wearing a hat and neckerchief tied around his throat.
“Moments like this are incredibly rare,” says Professor Frances Fowle, Senior Curator of French Art at the National Galleries of Scotland, in a press release. “We have discovered an unknown work by Vincent van Gogh, one of the most important and popular artists in the world.”
Van Gogh painted three dozen self-portraits in a decade. This allowed him to practice his skills as a painter and saved him the expense of hiring models for his work. He also often re-used canvases to save money. Rather than painting over his previous works, he would turn the canvas around. The most recently discovered painting joins several other similar self-portraits painted on the back of earlier canvases.
While the curators have seen the self-portrait through an X-ray, they have not yet uncovered the hidden painting. Removing the cardboard and glue is a delicate process, and the gallery’s press release said that research is ongoing about how to uncover the self-portrait without damaging Head of a Peasant Woman.
The original painting is of a woman named Gordina de Groot, a farmworker in Nuenen, a small farming community in the Netherlands. Van Gogh lived in the area for a short time in the 1880s and completed a series of works showcasing the community’s working- class residents.
Visitors will have a chance to see the X-ray image displayed in a specially crafted lightbox, along with Head of a Peasant Woman, at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh through Nov. 13.
Mirror of Webb Space Telescope Hit
Earlier this summer, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was hit by a micrometeoroid, and NASA reported that the hit caused “significant uncorrectable damage” to one of its 18 golden mirrors.
According to NASA, “micrometeoroid strikes are an unavoidable aspect of operating any spacecraft, which routinely sustain many impacts over the course of long and productive science missions in space.” Micrometeoroids are fragments of asteroids that are usually smaller than a grain of sand.
Since scientists knew that Webb would be hit during its time in space, they prepared for it as much as possible. Engineers kept Webb’s optics cleaner than required while on the ground—which helped improve its performance in space. Engineers also completed test impacts and simulations on mirror samples to see how they performed and to prepare the telescope as well as they could. The most recent impact was larger than scientis were able to test on the ground and larger than any simulations they ran. This is not the first impact Webb has sustained since being launched into space at the end of 2021, and NASA knows it won’t be the last.
“We always knew that Webb would have to weather the space environment, which includes harsh ultra- violet light and charged particles from the sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy, and occasional strikes by micrometeoroids within our solar system,” says Paul Geithner, technical deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Not only did engineers take steps to FORTIFY Webb before sending it into space, but flight teams can help protect Webb in orbit. For example, they can use maneuvers to turn the optics away from meteor showers when they know they’re coming. Unfortunately, this most recent impact was not the result of a meteor shower and NASA described it as “an unavoidable chance event.” The good news is that the other 17 mirror segments are not damaged and engineers have been able to realign everything to account for most of the damage.
Webb’s mission is to find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe and to see stars forming planetary systems. It’s orbiting the sun about one million miles from Earth. The $10 billion telescope could survive in space for more than 20 years!
