Focus on The Bathers (Courbet) and explore the X-ray.
The Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France X-rayed the canvas to see its underdrawing. This showed up the earliest composition for the work, in which a nude woman faced the viewer and pointed at a figure getting up on the right, probably a motif borrowed from a Perseus Delivering Andromeda which Courbet had copied in a museum. That composition was covered by a well-finished scene showing a lifesize figure in a striped costume with his hand in his hair and seemingly hallucinating as he throws himself off a precipice, with Death personified as a skeleton at the base waiting for him. A sketch of that work survives – Courbet was already working on it in April 1845 but abandoned it in January 1846. Seven years later he reused the canvas for The Bathers.
Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France