X-ray reveals hidden Van Gogh painting

A painting by Vincent Van Gogh has been discovered concealed under another work of art in a US gallery.

Art historians had known of a drawing by the artist, stored at the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands, but had always wondered whether it was a copy of a completed painting.

Now, the painting itself has been revealed after a conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston X-rayed another work.

Wild Vegetation, painted in June 1889, was discovered in an x-ray of The Ravine, which Van Gogh painted on the same canvas four months later, the Van Gogh Museum said.

Meta Chavannes, conservator at the MFA, said she revealed Wild Vegetation by “pure chance” while compiling information for some visiting scholars.

Chavannes said she became a “little bit obsessed” with the picture, so when she went home to Holland on holiday she decided to take the x-ray with her.

She went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where she showed it to curator Louis van Tilborgh.

“One of our specialists looked at the x-ray and recognised it as resembling a drawing from the museum,” said Natalie Bos, a spokeswoman for the Van Gogh Museum.

The museum called the discovery important for researchers and said it would display the drawing, done in brown reed pen, in Amsterdam starting next week as part of an exhibition of Van Gogh’s drawings running until October 7.

Vincent Van Gogh often sent drawings of his painted works to his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris.

The artist, who sold few paintings during his lifetime, relied on Theo to send him supplies, and painted new compositions over his old work if the materials arrived late and he lacked the money to buy his own.

Chavannes said Van Gogh sent his brother drawings of works in order to demonstrate his progress.

“His letters are scattered with requests for paint, tubes of paint, brushes. Basically all the materials he would need,” Chavannes said.

At the time Wild Vegetation was painted, Van Gogh was confined at the Saint-Remy asylum in southern France.

Armed with fresh materials from Theo, he was allowed off the hospital grounds and painted the surrounding landscape, including his famous series Wheatfields.

The painting was done in a wide range of colours. But the two-toned swirls of the drawing, which has been in the Amsterdam collection, though not on display, disclose little of the vibrancy of Van Gogh's painted works.

Van Gogh, whose career spanned just 10 years, shot himself to death in 1890.

A report on the discovery by van Tilborgh and Chavannes is being published this week in The Burlington Magazine, a leading art journal.

Coincidentally, the discovery came at the same time that a team from the Van Gogh Museum concluded that a painting in Australia’s National Gallery attributed to the Dutch master for more than 70 years was not a true Van Gogh.

Experts concluded that strong stylistic differences indicated it probably was painted by a contemporary.

The painting, Head of a Man, was taken to Australia in 1939 as part of an art exhibit owned by Keith Murdoch, father of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.