Head of a Peasant Woman

For more than a century this canvas carried a second picture on its back that nobody could see. Van Gogh painted the woman in the white cap in 1885 in Nuenen, the Brabant village where he was then living, and she is thought to be Gordina de Groot, one of the sitters for The Potato Eaters. Later, probably around 1887 in Paris and short of money, he turned the canvas over and painted himself on the reverse. In 1905 the picture was lent to an exhibition in Amsterdam, and because the canvas was fragile it was glued onto cardboard before framing, which covered the self-portrait completely. It came to light in 2022, when the National Galleries of Scotland X-rayed the painting ahead of an exhibition in Edinburgh. The X-ray shows a bearded man in a brimmed hat, with a neckerchief loosely tied at his throat.