When second-year WUDPAC Fellow Taryn Nurse, a painting major, began work on an 1866 portrait by 19th-century English artist Simeon Solomon, she had no idea it would turn into a detective story. The painting Atalanta, depicting the Greek mythological heroine, belongs to a private collector and is being treated at Winterthur as part of a larger collaboration with the Delaware Art Museum, which is organizing an upcoming exhibition on Solomon.          

The artist was once closely linked to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—a group of experimental artists in London who rejected the traditional teachings of the Royal Academy of Art. Solomon was arrested in 1873 for homosexuality—a scandal that led to his erasure from much of the art historical record.

Taryn’s project aims to shed new light on Solomon’s materials and methods, but early imaging on Atalanta revealed something entirely unexpected: a second, hidden composition. Beneath the portrait, a ghostly cityscape emerged through x-ray radiography and infrared reflectography. “We knew we were dealing with at least two paintings on the same stretcher,” she said. After additional examination under magnification, Taryn discovered not only a second image, but also two additional canvases: the portrait and cityscape were lined on a secondary support and mounted atop a third, primed but blank canvas.