Two for the price of one:
an X-ray revealed the lost treasure of Frederick Basil

While visitors to the National Gallery of Art in Washington are enjoying a new exhibition dedicated to the magnificent landscapes and chamber portraits of the Impressionists, Ann Gallery Hoenigswald, gallery restorer, explores the canvases in search of traces that could indicate the presence of hidden compositions under existing works.

Like a detective, the chief restorer of the National Gallery is looking for the slightest signs, to then direct the work to the laboratory, where modern tools will help reveal all the secrets of paintings and artists who wrote them.

Senior painting curator Ann Henigswald talks in front of x-rays of works by Frederick Basil at the National Gallery of Art. Honigswald is investigating some of Basil’s paintings. Photo: Matt McClain | The washington post

The biggest discovery of Honigsweild could be the discovery made thanks to the exposition Frederic Basil and the Birth of Impressionism. Last year, Honigsweild in Paris participated in organizing a joint exhibition of three museums: the National Gallery of Art, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, at which Basil’s important late work was opened (Frédéric Bazille) “Ruth and Boaz” (“Ruth and Boaz”). Now, when the work was presented at the exhibition and studied with the help of X-rays, it was discovered that it covered the earlier picture - “Young woman at the piano”, which was considered lost. Given that Basil died at the age of 28, leaving only about 60 paintings, each newly discovered work is considered a real treasure, even if we can not see it.

Honigswilde will continue the study in July, when the exhibition closes and she can pick up some of the paintings in her laboratory.

“Each image takes on a new meaning when you see more of the artist’s work,” says the restorer. “Individually, each of the works is interesting, but.. given that hidden works are detected quite often, this establishes a certain pattern and determines how the artist worked.”

Like many masters of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Édouard Manet, Basil emerged from the upper layers of the middle class. His family lived in Paris, where he studied art and medicine. In painting classes, he made friends with Renoir, Monet and Alfred Sisley, artists whose works are included in the exhibition. Basil shared the studio space with several of them, and his letters say that they helped each other acquire paints and canvases. Basil died at the age of 28 during the Franco-Prussian War, leaving about 60 works. 46 of his paintings are on display at the National Gallery, and this is the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work and his first major exhibition in the United States in a quarter century.

In total, curators from various museums discovered 11 earlier works of the artist, hidden under his surviving works. Basil often used his own canvases for new work to save money. As X-rays show, he did not paint over or scrape off previous layers of paint.

“He didn’t forget what was beneath them,” said Ann Honigswald. “It is extremely difficult to work on an existing image. But apparently he decided not to remove them in order to draw new inspiration from them. ”

As an example, Honigswald cites the painting Woman with Peonies. On it you can see where the elements of the previous work of Basil became the shadows of colors in the new picture.

Now the chief restorer and specialists of her team will examine the artist’s accessible paintings with infrared and X-rays in order to get as clear pictures of hidden works as possible.

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru