Unknown Painting Discovered Beneath Portrait from Picasso’s Famed Blue Period

The most studied period of Pablo Picasso’s career, it seems, still had a secret to keep: a mystery woman hidden beneath a well-known portrait, now revealed by conservators at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.  X-ray and infrared analysis were conducted on Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto (1901), a depiction of a Spanish sculptor who befriended Picasso during his Blue Period, a stylistically pivotal though melancholic moment in the painter’s early oeuvre. Over t