An X-Ray Found a Lost Vermeer Behind This Painting

[00:00:00]Look closely at this girl. She is barely bigger than a sheet of paper.

[00:00:03]>> [music] >> One of the smallest things Vermeer ever painted. Her hat blazes. Her eyes have just turned as if she has caught a sound somewhere off to the side.

[00:00:14]For 300 years, she looked like a fresh, effortless little study [music] dashed off in one bright burst. Then, in 2022, a team in Washington turned their cameras through the paint >> [music] >> and found a second painting underneath her. Not a sketch, a finished face. A man looking back the other way.

[00:00:34]>> [music] >> And he is hanging upside down.

[00:00:37]He had been there the whole time under three centuries of admiration. And no one had ever seen him. Her name is Girl with the Red Hat, painted by Johannes Vermeer around 1669.

[00:00:50]Vermeer left us only about 35 paintings in his entire life, >> [music] >> and we know almost nothing about the man himself.

[00:00:58]There is no certain portrait of his face anywhere.

[00:01:02]The closest we have >> [music] >> is a figure he painted from behind. A painter at his easel turned away from us forever.

[00:01:10]He was a slow, secretive worker in the small Dutch city of Delft. Famous for a kind of light you feel you could step into. And this tiny panel is one of his strangest survivors. Not because of what is on it, but because of what he chose to paint it on. So, look at what she is made of. Almost nothing [music] in her is sharp.

[00:01:33]The two lions' heads on her chair are soft blurs of light. The hat is not painted hair [music] by hair.

[00:01:40]It is laid down in broad, wet, confident sweeps as if he were racing the paint before it could dry.

[00:01:48]This is Vermeer at his loosest and most alive.

[00:01:52]>> [music] >> And it is painted not on canvas like nearly everything else he made, but on a small wooden panel, the only one we are sure he ever used. Panel is hard and smooth, [music] and it holds a wet brush stroke differently from cloth, part of why this little study looks the way it does.

[00:02:09]Everything about her feels spontaneous, unplanned, caught in a single sitting.

[00:02:15]And that is the puzzle. How do you paint something this quick, this sure, this free, without a stumble, [music] without a moment's hesitation?

[00:02:24]The answer is hiding on the other side of the paint. [music] Vermeer was not a fast painter.

[00:02:29]He made only a dozen or so works a decade, building his light in patient, invisible layers, a man who left nothing to chance.

[00:02:38]This is the painter who could spend weeks on a single curve of light along a wall.

[00:02:43]So this loose, [music] racing little panel sits oddly in his careful hands.

[00:02:49]And here, the question sharpens. A man this meticulous, reaching for a fresh surface, [music] instead picks up a panel that already has a finished face on it. Wood was costly, and reusing an old board was ordinary enough in his century.

[00:03:05]But Vermeer does not scrape the [music] old picture away. He does not lay a clean gray layer over it to start again.

[00:03:12]He does something far stranger. And to see it, you have to know exactly what was already sitting [music] on that piece of wood.

[00:03:19]Underneath her is a man, a bust-length portrait, a broad-brimmed hat, a collar with a tasseled tie, >> [music] >> a single button on his coat, the kind of fashion a Dutchman wore around 1650, years before this girl was ever imagined. [music] Turn the panel the right way up, and you would meet her eyes. He was never finished. He sits there, blocked in and then abandoned, waiting on a shelf in Delft for someone to decide what to do with him.

[00:03:48]Whose face he is, >> [music] >> no one has ever settled.

[00:03:52]His brushwork is freer than Vermeer's polished surfaces. So, for a long time, scholars assumed another hand had made him entirely. He was a dead end, an unfinished stranger on a reused board.

[00:04:05]And then, Vermeer turned him upside down.

[00:04:08]In 2022, >> [music] >> the National Gallery of Art in Washington turned its full arsenal on the little panel, X-rays and scanners [music] that read each chemical element in the paint one buried layer at a time.

[00:04:21]And there he was, the whole man lying head to toe against the girl, rotated a clean 180°. [music] But the real shock was how Vermeer had used him.

[00:04:32]He did not cover the man over. The scans [music] show no fresh layer between the two of them, no clean start at all.

[00:04:39]Think about the nerve of that.

[00:04:42]Vermeer simply flipped the panel and painted the girl straight onto the upside-down stranger, improvising with no drawing of his own beneath her, letting the shapes already there carry his new picture.

[00:04:53]And here is the part that stops you.

[00:04:56]That glorious sweep of her red hat, the boldest stroke in the whole painting, [music] it isn't hers.

[00:05:03]Those broad curves were first laid down to be the collar of the man below.

[00:05:07]The most thrilling brushstroke [music] Vermeer never made.

[00:05:11]She is so alive because she was built on someone else's unfinished face. We still don't know who he is.

[00:05:19]The face beneath the girl might belong to some forgotten Delft painter.

[00:05:23]It might be Carel Fabritius, the brilliant artist who left barely a dozen works behind. Or, and the gallery now believes [music] this is genuinely possible, the buried man may be Vermeer's own face, an early attempt he never finished and could not bring himself to [music] waste.

[00:05:40]If that is true, it would be the only portrait of a man by Vermeer we have, hidden in plain sight for three [music] centuries, facing the wrong way the whole time. We may never know for certain. The scan can show us his face, but not his name. But, that is the wonder of it. The most [music] famous paintings on Earth are still keeping secrets, and a machine switched on in our own lifetime can find a second [music] face sleeping under the first.

[00:06:07]So, look closer.

[00:06:10]Who do you think is buried under the girl in the red hat?