Radiologist's work helps museums uncover paintings' secrets

It’s unlikely the brooding stare in van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait” reflects a premonition of nasty rumors that would circulate about the work nearly a century after his death.

More likely, the artist was simply experimenting with expression and technique.

Dr. Harold Moskowitz, radiologist. Photo supplied by the UConn Health Center

Luckily for the Wadsworth Atheneum, which owns the painting, the staring face covers a shadowy figure of a woman museum officials believe van Gogh painted on the canvas before he used it for his self-portrait.

The similarity of that figure to peasants and country scenes painted by van Gogh between 1882 and 1885 in Nuenen, the Netherlands, helps squelch charges of forgery that were leveled against the painting in the late 1980’s.

The figure was uncovered with an X-ray 20 years ago by Health Center radiologist Dr. Harold Moskowitz, when he was director of radiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in Hartford.

The painting is now part of an exhibition at the Atheneum, What Lies Beneath: Revealing Painters’ Secrets, that displays what the Atheneum calls a fairly common phenomenon: under-images of paintings.

Moskowitz says the opportunity to take an X-ray of the painting came along by chance: “I met the museum’s chief conservator, Stephen Kornhauser, at a gathering, and he said the museum could use my help. He wanted me to X-ray the painting because of charges by a famous art critic that it was a forgery.”

The painting was brought to the hospital, where it was carefully X-rayed. When the film was hung on the view box, Moskowitz says, “at first we didn’t know what we were looking at. Then we turned it around and there was a rush of excitement as museum experts recognized the Nuenen figure.”