VOLUME 24 #3

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Once an infrared photograph revealed the ghostly outlines of a man's portrait in a Susan Macdowell Eakins’ painting, art conservation student Gerrit Albertson used Photoshop to draw in the possible outlines of the man lurking beneath.
Image courtesy of Gerrit Albertson
Once an infrared photograph revealed the ghostly outlines of a man's portrait in a Susan Macdowell Eakins’ painting, art conservation student Gerrit Albertson used Photoshop to draw in the possible outlines of the man lurking beneath.

84 years later, a secret comes to light

OUR STUDENTS | Peering intently at the The Bibliophile, Gerrit Albertson found himself puzzled by the old painting. In certain light, from certain angles, the ridges and swirls of the brushstrokes seemed odd, as if they belonged to another painting, by another artist, of a different subject entirely.

He wondered if the legend were true: Could there be a treasure hiding beneath this portrait of a pensive man lost in the pages of a book? Could its creator—Susan Macdowell Eakins—have painted over a work by her far-more-famous husband, Thomas Eakins? Finding the answer would take Albertson, AS17M, on a journey deep into the high-tech world of art sleuthing, giving the art conservation graduate student a chance at discovering a new work by one of America’s most important artists.

Once an infrared photograph revealed the ghostly outlines of a man's portrait in a Susan Macdowell Eakins’ painting, art conservation student Gerrit Albertson used Photoshop to draw in the possible outlines of the man lurking beneath.
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson
Art conservation graduate student Gerrit Albertson, AS17M, works to reveal lost stories of art and artists.

At first, he thought the task would be relatively simple: Just X-ray the 84-year-old painting, and its secrets should be revealed. But there was a problem—a previous restoration had used lead-based adhesives on the backing, making it impervious to X-rays.

“That would have been the easiest and the best way to see if there was something underneath it. So I had to start looking for other techniques,” says Albertson, who is a student in the Winterthur/UD Program in Art Conservation, a jointly sponsored effort that is one of only five such graduate conservation programs in North America, allowing students to work with major museums and cultural institutions throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Over the course of a year, even as Albertson scoured museums for more clues, he tried an array of tried-and-tested methods. Ultraviolet light. Infrared reflectography. “Raking light” and then reflectance transformation imaging. “Nothing really cut it,” he says. The painting’s quiet man revealed nothing. Albertson had one more chance—somehow convince the National Gallery of Art in Washington to use its hyperspectral reflectance spectroscopy "Ex-NIR" camera, considered a state-of-the-art non-invasive imaging technology for art detectives.

“Very few institutions have one. So it was really special that I got to use it,” says Albertson, who arrived with the painting in Washington early on a March morning, a year after beginning his journey, and waited for the test results to arrive. “Already, by the end of the day, I knew we had something, which was really exciting.”

The scans showed the ghostly outlines of what appeared to be a man’s half-length portrait, oriented cross-wise beneath the existing painting. His head was clearly visible, and his features seemed to emerge faintly, as if through a fog. But the riddle was only partly solved: Was this long-hidden portrait done by Thomas Eakins? He presented his findings to experts, and their verdict was…well, as murky as the image itself.

“They decided it’s hard to attribute the image underneath. It’s not like looking at a painting and seeing the brushwork with your own eyes. Plus, the image underneath is kind of sketchy, it looks unfinished. So it’s very hard to ascribe a specific artist to this underpainting.

“I think it’s not unlikely that it’s Eakins, but I don’t think there is any proof that it’s Eakins,” he says. The real reward was the hunt itself, says Albertson, whose mother Rita Albertson, AS83M, is now chief conservator at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, and also a graduate of the UD conservation program that is jointly sponsored with Delaware’s Winterthur Museum—known worldwide for its revered collection of American decorative arts.

“It was really thrilling to find the portrait underneath,” he says. “That was a huge payoff, because I had spent a huge amount of time researching, looking, trying to find that out.”

Article by Eric Ruth, AS93