Preparation of the Dead Girl

For decades this was known as a wedding picture, bought in 1929 as a scene of women dressing a young bride. Then in 1960 an X-ray looked beneath the surface and found something else entirely. Courbet's central figure had first been painted as a dead woman, arms hanging, head fallen against her shoulder, being washed and laid out by the women around her. He never finished the canvas. After his death in 1877 the corpse was quietly reworked into a seated bride so the painting could sell, and its real subject was lost for some 80 years. Scholars now call it closer to what Courbet seems to have intended, a laying-out of the dead. It hangs at a women's college in Massachusetts, where the before-and-after X-ray is used to teach students how to read a painting's hidden history.