Hidden dog discovered in Pablo Picasso painting
A previously undiscovered dog has been found in a classic painting by Pablo Picasso. Conservators at the Guggenheim Museum in New York have uncovered the small canine wearing a red bow in the painting Le Moulin de la Galette ahead of a new exhibition focused on the Spanish painter’s early works.
For the new exhibit entitled “Young Picasso in Paris”, the Guggenheim is displaying ten paintings and drawings made by Picasso upon his arrival in the French capital as a teenager in 1900. Le Moulin de la Galette depicts a night at the famous Parisian dance hall of the same name. The crown of dancers is anchored by three seated figures at a table in the foreground of the painting.
Conservators were able to generate an image of what the dog had originally looked like using X-ray fluorescence, an imaging technique that charts the chemical elements in a painting and how they changed over the course of the painting’s development. The dog had previously been painted over by Picasso at some point.
“It was interesting to me that he hastily painted over this dog, which would have been a rather compelling aspect of the composition,” senior conservator Julie Barten told CNN. “It would have stolen the show. [Audiences had to] look more carefully at all of these other wonderful figures in the composition — to experience the space in different ways.”
The museum estimated that the dog most closely resembles a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Barten suggested that the puppy would have been too distracting from the rest of the picture and hypothesised that this was the reason that Picasso opted to cover it up.
“We see, more and more, that this was part of Picasso’s working process,” Barten explained. “As he developed a composition, he would paint out certain elements, or transform them into new compositional details. And, very often, he would leave aspects of the underlying original compositions still evident to a viewer who was looking very closely.”
