It was on a Friday afternoon that they found him, staring intently from the back of a canvas in a wide-brimmed hat and loose neckerchief: a previously undiscovered self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, one of the most popular and influential figures in western art history, which had been hiding in plain sight in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland for more than half a century.
“It was absolutely thrilling,” says Lesley Stevenson, senior paintings conservator at the National Galleries of Scotland, of the moment that a routine conservation X-ray of another Van Gogh painting, Head of a Peasant Woman, revealed this extraordinary find on the back of the canvas, hidden for more than 100 years beneath layers of glue and cardboard.
