WASHINGTON (KGO) –There’s been an amazing discovery beneath one of Pablo Picasso’s earliest masterpieces.
Curators and scientists say they’ve found a hidden painting beneath Picasso’s 1901 work, “The Blue Room,” which is part of the Phillips Collection in Washington.
The mystery picture under the surface is a portrait of an unknown man painted in a vertical composition. In the painting, he rests on his hand with three rings on his fingers and is dressed in a jacket and bow tie.
Curators say a technical analysis confirms that it’s a work Picasso likely painted just before “The Blue Room.”
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 fueling new research about the painting created early in Picasso’s career while he was working in Paris at the start of his distinctive blue period of melancholy subjects.