X-rays reveal a small 19th-century beetle embedded in a Paul Gauguin painting

After research by the French artist Paul Gauguin‘S The little cat Using X-ray images, experts from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam unravel the secrets of the painting, including a hidden beetle.

As the post-impressionist artist worked on the piece, the doomed beetle somehow got into his paint and stuck to the canvas. The remains were only about one millimeter in size and went unnoticed until now.

The researchers aren’t sure what type of beetle it is. As they say Artnet‘s Eileen Kinsellam, “It’s on its back, the head and legs broken off.”

The analysis also showed this The little cat was originally part of a larger painting by Gauguin. Museum experts discovered that the threads surrounding the cloth on three sides of the work were stretched into curved shapes.

The fourth side bears no such markings, indicating that “the cloth on the right side was cut, probably by Gauguin himself,” according to one researcher. statement of the museum.

Gauguin painted The little cat in 1888, when he visited Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France. The artists lived together for two months in the now iconic ‘Yellow House’. “Discussions about art became more frequent and sometimes more intense,” according to the Van Gogh Museum website. “Vincent thought it was important to work from reality. Gauguin painted from his memory, from his imagination.”

In December, Van Gogh famously cut off his left ear, and Gauguin returned to Paris. But before their brief collaboration ended, the two artists influenced and challenged each other.

“[Gauguin is] often characterized as confident and someone Van Gogh looked up to,” says Joost van der Hoeven, researcher at the museum, according to the Art newspaperby Martin Bailey. “But maybe the relationship was more of a relationship of equals.”

According to the museum, Gauguin was particularly impressed by Van Gogh’s Sunflowerswhat inspired him to “[start] working on his own yellow still life.”

“Vincent wrote to his brother Theo that Gauguin was ‘working on… a large still life of an orange pumpkin and some apples and white linen on a yellow background and foreground,’” the statement said. “This quote is intriguing because a ‘large still life’ by Gauguin is unknown.”

The little cat just happens to have an orange pumpkin and a yellow background. Experts therefore think that it belonged to the larger canvas that Van Gogh once described.

Another clue can be found in a Portrait from 1888 that Van Gogh made of his friend: it shows Gauguin working on a yellow canvas with a spherical orange object on it – elements of The little cat and demonstrating the artists’ influence on each other. Experts say Van Gogh’s portrait was also cut out, but no one knows why.

“It may be that he was dissatisfied with the photo, but wanted to keep Gauguin’s image, either for possible copying or simply as a memento of their collaboration in Arles,” the newspaper writes. Art newspaper. “But another possibility is that Gauguin did not like his failed still life being depicted and asked Van Gogh to cut it out.”