Picasso’s The Blue Room

Washington, June 18 (AP): Scientists and art experts finally know what’s beneath one of Pablo Picasso’s first masterpieces, The Blue Room, using advances in infrared imagery to reveal a hidden portrait of a bow-tied man with his face resting on his hand.

Now the question that conservators at The Phillips Collection in Washington hope to answer is simply: Who is he?

It’s a mystery that’s fuelling new research about the 1901 painting created early in Picasso’s career while he was working in Paris at the start of his distinctive blue period of melancholy subjects.

Curators and conservators revealed the discovery of the portrait for the first time to The Associated Press last week.

Experts long suspected there might be something under the surface of The Blue Room, which has been part of The Phillips Collection since 1927. Brushstrokes on the piece clearly don’t match the composition that depicts a woman bathing in Picasso’s studio.

A conservator noted the odd brushstrokes in a 1954 letter, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that an X-ray of the painting first revealed a fuzzy image of something under the picture. It wasn’t clear, though, that it was a portrait.

In 2008, improved infrared imagery revealed for the first time a man’s bearded face resting on his hand with three rings on his fingers. He’s dressed in a jacket and bow tie, painted in a vertical composition.

“It’s really one of those moments that really makes what you do special,” said Patricia Favero, the conservator at The Phillips Collection who pieced together the best infrared image yet of the man's face. “The second reaction was, ‘Well, who is it?’ We’re still working on answering that question.”

Scholars have ruled out the possibility that it was a self-portrait. One possible figure is the Paris art dealer Ambrose Villard, who hosted Picasso’s first show in 1901. But there’s no documentation and no clues left on the canvas, so the research continues.

A technical analysis confirmed the hidden portrait is a work Picasso likely painted just before The Blue Room, curators said.