Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses

For years this large bouquet was a problem. It seemed too big, too crowded with flowers, and the signature sat in an odd place, so in 2003 the experts struck it from Van Gogh's catalogue altogether. The answer was hiding underneath. In 2012 a team scanning the canvas with an X-ray technique at a particle accelerator in Hamburg found another picture below the flowers: two half-naked wrestlers, locked together. That matched a letter Van Gogh had sent his brother Theo in January 1886, describing a large study of two nude torsos, two wrestlers, that he was pleased with. Short of money, he had turned the old canvas around and painted this dense mass of meadow flowers and roses straight over it. The discovery put the still life back among his paintings in 2012, more than a hundred years after he covered the wrestlers over.