Pablo Picasso apparently reused a canvas that had featured the portrait of an unknown man to paint his masterpiece “The Blue Room.”

Hidden Portrait Under Picasso Painting

Curators and conservators discovered the hidden portrait via the use of infrared imagery back in 2008, but just recently revealed the discovery, reported CNN. The image below "The Blue Room," which is housed at The Phillips Collection in Washington, features a bearded man who is wearing a jacket and bow tie, resting his face on his hand, which is bejeweled with three rings.

"This painting 'The Blue Room' is very important in [Picasso's] early work. It's considered an early Blue Period painting," Patricia Favero, associate conservator at the Phillips, said. "To find this painting underneath — which we think was painted in the same year, just earlier in the year and it's completely different in style — it gives us some insight into Picasso's development over the course of that year."

A conservator first noticed brushstrokes on "The Blue Room" inconsistent with the image back in the 1950s, and wrote of them in a letter. In the 90s, an X-ray revealed that the conservator had been right about the brushstrokes, though the image the X-ray produced was too fuzzy to indicate anything more than that the original image on the canvas was a portrait.

Picasso painted "The Blue Room" in 1901, at the start of his Blue Period in Paris and around the time of his first show, which was hosted by art dealer Ambrose Villard – possibly the subject of the portrait. Due to Picasso’s meager earnings, he could not always afford fresh canvases for his paintings, particularly when an idea rushed to him.

Picasso’s “Woman Ironing,” which is housed at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, has been revealed to have a portrait of a mustached man beneath the 1904 painting on the surface.

GET THE FREE uINTERVIEW iPHONE APP FOR LATEST NEWS UPDATES