Vase with Lilacs, Daisies and Anemones

In the summer of 1887 Van Gogh was living in Paris and painting flower still lifes by the dozen. This small one hides another picture. When the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva examined it with X-rays, a bearded head in profile turned up under the bouquet. The museum reads it as Van Gogh himself, close to his self-portrait with a pipe from late 1886 in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, a canvas of exactly the same size. He seems to have scraped the thickest ridges of the old face flat with a knife and painted the flowers straight over it, with no layer of white in between. Researchers in the Netherlands have found dozens of his canvases from 1884 to 1888 reused in the same way. On the left edge he signed this one simply Vincent, in a watery green on the blue.