Researchers Uncover Infrared Image of Magritte Painting Resembling Wife and Muse

An underpainting of an anonymous model by René Magritte that researchers believe could depict an image of his wife and muse, Georgette, has been discovered by researchers at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB) in Brussels.

Overseeing the analyses of the artist’s work is Catherine Defeyt, senior researcher at the University of Liège and RMFAB, and Francisca Vandepitte, a senior curator who specializes in modern art at the Brussels museum. The study examines 50 paintings Magritte produced between 1921 and 1967.

The findings, which have been verified by conservationists at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, will be published by the West Coast arts center in a forthcoming book titled René Magritte: The Artist’s Materials next month.

In a statement announcing the study in May, the Los Angeles research center acknowledged that the research would add to understandings of Magritte’s practice and fill in historical gaps, despite the fact that researchers and critics have eyed Magritte’s work in-depth for decades. “Little has been documented regarding his process,” the statement said.

The previously unknown painting was uncovered during an analysis of Magritte’s 1943 work La Cinquième Saison (The Fifth Season), The Guardian reported Sunday. That work, which depicts two men donning bowler hats and holding framed paintings, resides in the collection of RMFAB in Brussels. The artist, who died in the late 1960s, is known for his painted illusions that often position familiar objects against eerie scenes.

Researchers at the Getty and the Brussels museum conducting the current study argue that the unidentified figure who appears in the underpainting resembles the artist’s wife, Georgette, who Magritte married in 1922 and who was a recurring subject in his work. Eventually, she would become the painter’s sole heir overseeing his estate but kept ties to the Brussels museum. After her death in 1986, she donated a group of seven paintings to the Belgian institution.

The black-and-white x-ray image taken during the study and set to be officially published in August closely resembles another image of the surrealist muse, an image of her face starring directly at the viewer, that appears in the 1934 painting Georgette Magritte held in the Brussels museum collection.

Researchers have in similar analyses used infrared imaging to study historical paintings and other analyses have yielded appearances of previously unknown under-paintings by artists like Pablo Picasso at museums in New York and Philadelphia. Magritte and Picasso, who were active around the first half of the twentieth century, among other artists, were known to have painted over canvases multiple times in their early careers due to financial strains.