Curators at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, about 100 miles northeast of London, have discovered that underlying René Magritte‘s 1935 painting La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition) is one quarter of La Pose Enchantée (The Enchanted Pose), a 1927 painting. 
 
 For unknown reasons, the Belgian Surrealist cut the 1927 canvas into quarters and painted other works on the pieces. The Magritte catalogue raisonné lists the work’s whereabouts as unknown; it is familiar only from a black-and-white photograph. The lost canvas showed two identical female nudes, side by side, each with one arm resting on a broken, fluted column. 
 
 The mystery first emerged when staffers at New York’s Museum of Modern Art discovered, in preparation for a 2013 exhibition, that one of the museum’s own Magritte canvases harbored a painting underneath the surface. 
 
 A conservator at the Menil Collection, in Houston, Texas, a co-organizer of the show, quickly identified the underpainting, visible in X rays, as a fragment of The Enchanted Pose. 
 
 “Our painting La Condition Humaine has in fact been successfully hiding part of La Pose Enchantée for more than 80 years,” Norwich Castle curator Giorgia Bottinelli said in a press release. 
 
 The Norwich painting is the third piece of the puzzle that has been located; the MoMA and Menil curators and conservators had determined that The Red Model (1935), from Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, was also painted on a piece of La Pose Enchantée. The initial clues were the paintings’ matching sizes and the fact that the sides of the canvases along the wooden stretchers had paint on them, unusually for Magritte, suggesting that the canvas had been previously painted. 
 
 “All we need to discover now is where the fourth and final, upper-right-hand quarter is,” says Bottinelli. “Then this exciting art world jigsaw puzzle will be complete.” 
 
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 Bottom-right corner of The Enchanted Pose is found hidden under another painting in castle’s gallery 
 
 A missing piece of a lost painting by René Magritte has been discovered in a British collection, three years after two more sections were found in the US and Sweden. 
 
 The painting, called The Enchanted Pose, was exhibited in 1927 but then disappeared without trace. A black and white photo of it shows two almost identical female nudes side by side in a neoclassical style. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest An x-ray of The Human Condition with outlines showing legs from The Enchanted Pose. Photograph: Norfolk Museums Service 
 
 It appears the Belgian artist, creator of some of the 20th century’s best-known images, cut up the 114cm by 162cm painting, perhaps because he needed canvases for a major exhibition in 1936. Only one section now remains missing. 
 
 The lower right-hand quarter was found in Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, it was announced on Thursday. It was hidden beneath another Magritte painting, The Human Condition, a painting-within-a-painting in which a painted mountain view on an easel blends almost seamlessly with a mountain view behind it. It is typical of Magritte’s enigmatic compositions that tease the eye and juxtapose unlikely objects, such as bowler hats and apples, in settings that play with the idea of reality and illusion. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giorgia Bottinelli and Alice Tavares da Silva examine The Human Condition. Photograph: Norfolk Museums Service 
 
 In 2013, the Guardian reported that, to the excitement of art experts, x-rays and other imaging techniques had located two other sections of The Enchanted Pose beneath two other Magritte pictures. 
 
 A head and torso were hidden under The Portrait, which depicts an eye on a slice of prosciutto, and feet were found beneath The Red Model, which portrays feet as surrealist boots. They hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm respectively. 
 
 
 
 The Norwich painting is an oil on canvas measuring 54cm by 73cm. Each of the three over-painted pictures dates from 1935 and is roughly the same size. 
 
 Magritte recalled in 1966 that the 1927 exhibition was his first to represent “truly … what I consider valuable … in my work”. It came shortly before the artist painted his famous pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). 
 
 The Enchanted Pose is reminiscent of Picasso’s nudes of the 1920s. Despite critical acclaim, it failed to sell and was returned to the artist after the exhibition. 
 
 The Norwich Castle discovery came to light while Alice Tavares da Silva, a conservator who also works for the Hamilton Kerr Institute at the University of Cambridge, was studying the picture before its loan to the major Magritte retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which opens this month. 
 
 Once the picture’s frame had been removed, she noticed the edges had been painted over and round the stretcher in a way that was unrelated to the composition on the front. There were details, she later discovered, such as “a little bit of the blue sky”. 
 
 Further research led her to a report by conservators at MoMA. The painting was then transferred to the Hamilton Kerr Institute to be x-rayed and studied further. The results confirmed initial suspicions. She describes the discovery as “hugely exciting”. 
 
 The Human Condition was exhibited in London in 1936 as part of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Burlington Gardens. It was acquired in 1966 by Sir Robert Adeane, a passionate collector of contemporary art who had served as a trustee of the Tate. In 1995, as part of the acceptance in lieu scheme, The Human Condition was allocated to Norwich Castle. 
 
 In a statement, Dr Giorgia Bottinelli, its curator of historic art, said: “All we need to discover now is where the fourth and final, upper-right hand quarter is. Then this exciting art world jigsaw puzzle will be complete.” 

 Norwich Castle finds itself at the centre of an international art mystery 
 
 ené Magritte 1898-1967 La Condition Humaine, 1935 Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm NWHCM : 1995.88.2. © ADAGP, Paris © ADAGP, Paris 
 
 Norwich has found itself at the centre of an international art mystery surrounding a lost painting by a major artist. 
 
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 The only known photograph of La Pose Enchantée, 1927 by René Magritte, 1898-1967 The only known photograph of La Pose Enchantée, 1927 by René Magritte, 1898-1967 
 
 For more than 80 years the whereabouts of a work by Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte has mystified the art world, but an intriguing treasure hunt of clues spanning different continents has led art experts to find the latest part of the jigsaw puzzle at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. 
 
 A quarter of the painting called La Pose Enchantée (The Enchanted Pose) has been uncovered underneath one of Magritte’s later paintings from 1935 which is housed at Norwich Castle. 
 
 The amazing find was made as experts prepared for Magritte’s La Condition Humaine to be loaned to the Pompidou Centre in Paris for a major exhibition. 
 
 It follows previous discoveries of two other quarters of the elusive painting behind Magritte works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. 
 
 Upside-down x-ray of Norfolk Museum Service's La Condition Humaine, clearly showing, on the left, the legs and hand of a woman and the base of a column. NB. Lines have been added to make the outline easier to see. © Hamilton Kerr Institute/Norfolk Museum Service Upside-down x-ray of Norfolk Museum Service's La Condition Humaine, clearly showing, on the left, the legs and hand of a woman and the base of a column. NB. Lines have been added to make the outline easier to see. © Hamilton Kerr Institute/Norfolk Museum Service 
 
 Now there is just one quarter left to find of the painting, which was first exhibited in 1927 and until recently was only known to modern day art experts from an old black and white photograph. 
 
 Dr Giorgia Bottinelli, curator of historic art at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, said: “The last reference to La Pose Enchantée, a large painting of two female nudes, was in 1932, after which it completely disappeared. Even Magritte’s Catalogue Raisonné lists its whereabouts as unknown. What happened to the missing painting is now, however, slowly coming to light in a remarkable series of events. It seems that, for some reason, Magritte must have decided to cut the painting into quarters, and then painted four completely different paintings over the top. 
 
 “So our painting, La Condition Humaine, has in fact been successfully hiding part of La Pose Enchantée for more than 80 years.” 
 
 Norwich’s link to the missing painting was uncovered thanks to dedicated detective work by conservator Alice Tavares da Silva, working on behalf of Norfolk Museums Service. 
 
 Curator of Historic Art at Norwich Castle, Giorgia Bottinelli (left) and conservator, Alice Tavares da Silva, examine Magritte’s La Condition Humaine, © Norfolk Museums Service Curator of Historic Art at Norwich Castle, Giorgia Bottinelli (left) and conservator, Alice Tavares da Silva, examine Magritte’s La Condition Humaine, © Norfolk Museums Service 
 
 She said finding the lower right-hand quarter of the painting was “a hugely exciting discovery” and said that it meant it was possible to have a greater understanding of the original painting. 
 
 “Now that we have found the third missing quarter, we have the necessary amount of information to add to MoMA’s existing colour reconstruction and are able to get a more complete idea of what La Pose Enchantée would have originally looked like in colour. Until recently we have only known of its existence from a black and white photograph,” she said. 
 
 HOW THE MYSTERY UNFOLDED 
 
 Norwich Castle’s part in the mystery of the missing painting began in February when conservator Alice Tavares da Silva examined Magritte’s 1935 painting La Condition Humaine. She discovered the painting’s edges were painted with form and colour that appeared to be unrelated to the painting. Research led her to a report from conservators at New York’s Museum of Modern Art which described a similar finding in 2013 involving the 1935 Magritte work, The Portrait. When the painting was X-rayed, part of a female nude was discovered underneath which was the upper-left quarter of La Pose Enchantée. This led to Magritte’s The Red Model, at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, being scrutinised – and the lower-left quarter of La Pose Enchantée was found. Ms Tavares da Silva said: “I realised there were striking similarities between the Norwich painting and these two other works by Magritte, notably size and the date of execution. More so, the paint visible on the edges seemed to relate very closely to the composition of La Pose Enchantée. I was then able to superimpose an image of an exposed edge with the black and white illustration of La Pose Enchantée and conclude the Norwich painting was painted over the lower right quarter of the original composition. It was a hugely exciting discovery so I immediately arranged to take the painting to the Hamilton Kerr Institute, at the University of Cambridge, to be X-rayed and analysed. The results confirmed my initial observations that La Condition Humaine was indeed the lower right-hand quarter of the missing painting.”
– An "exciting art world jigsaw puzzle" is nearly complete after the third piece of a painting by Belgian artist René Magritte missing for more than 80 years was recently discovered hiding at the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Britain, the Guardian reports. Magritte's The Enchanted Pose was part of a 1927 exhibition, but no one purchased it, and it was returned to Magritte. Since 1932, its whereabouts have been unknown, leaving behind only a single black-and-white photograph as evidence. In 2013, two pieces of The Enchanted Pose—which shows two nude women standing next to each other—were discovered hidden beneath other Magritte paintings in the US and Sweden. The discovery of the third piece, the lower right corner, was announced Thursday. The new piece of The Enchanted Pose was discovered by art conservator Alice Tavares da Silva, who was inspecting a Magritte painting called The Human Condition before it was loaned out to another museum. She discovered paint on the side of the canvas under the frame that didn't match the painting itself. Artnet News reports it's rare for a Magritte work to have paint on the edges. An X-ray of The Human Condition revealed it was painted over a piece of The Enchanted Pose. Tavares da Silva calls it a "hugely exciting discovery." According to the Norfolk Eastern Daily Press, it now appears Magritte cut The Enchanted Pose into four equal pieces for unknown reasons, then painted over them. But there's still one piece of the puzzle missing. (A Degas painting panned as discolored hid secret image.)