Source: Restoration reveals hidden whale in 17th-century Dutch painting
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| Photograph: Fitzwilliam Museum |
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| Photograph: Fitzwilliam Museum |
It was always a bit of a puzzle what the people clustered on the sands, or peering down from the dunes, were actually looking at on a bleak stretch of windswept Dutch beach. The startling truth has just been revealed, after the conservator Shan Kuang took a delicate scalpel to a painting which has been in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for the past 140 years. She first uncovered a baffling figure of man apparently standing in mid air, and then gradually revealed that he was standing on the great hillock of a beached whale, washed up on the shallows.
The varnish of the beach scene had yellowed and become unsightly, but as she removed it the mid-air man appeared, beside what appeared to be a sail. She could also see that a stretch of the sea was clearly a later addition. There was a long debate among the experts about the potential risk of damaging the painting before she proceeded to remove the overpainting, using a scalpel and solvents, working on tiny areas under a microscope.
What a pleasant turn of event for the art world, indeed. To me, this is a bit like describing the therapy process: we work on integrating and developing our better self, and sometimes in the process, we may be surprised to find the beauty and wisdom that may have eluded us for years.
