Discovery and material study of the missing feet part from Magritte’s L’évidence éternelle of 1954

Abstract

One of the two missing canvases from L' évidence éternelle of 1954, the one of the feet, has been discovered beneath a small woman portrait painted in 1958, La toile de Pénélope. Indeed, the underlying woman's feet revealed through the IRR and XRR images leave little doubt about the identity of the hidden composition. All the more so as the canvas dimensions perfectly match with the format ascribed to the feet part in the diagram Magritte made of the 1954 variant of L' évidence éternelle. This paper presents the main results of the material study conducted on La toile de Pénélope by means of non-invasive and complementary imaging and analytical techniques. Furthermore, it proposes a virtual colorized reconstruction of the hidden picture, built on the basis of the XRR and IRR images, the elemental information provided by the MA-XRF analysis, the Raman results and the microscope examination of the painting surface.

2020 atomic spectrometry update – a review of advances in X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and its special applications

“…A comparison of SR- and laboratory-scale macroXRF spectrometry scans illustrated the essential role that tunable SR played in recovering the underlying landscape scene. Defeyt et al 88 presented the main results of a study conducted on René Magritte’s La toile de Penelope (1958) which included the feet lying underneath the current picture. In order to obtain further details on the hidden composition and to get a better understanding of the distribution of the pigments, a macroXRF spectrometry scanning of the total canvas (24.6 × 14.8 cm) was conducted.…”