Portrait of mystery woman found hidden beneath century-old Picasso

For more than a century, a portrait of a mystery woman lay hidden beneath a painting from Pablo Picasso s famed Blue Period. Now, with the help of adv...

For more than a century, a portrait of a mystery woman lay hidden beneath a painting from Pablo Picasso’s famed Blue Period. Now, with the help of advanced imaging technology, conservators at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Britain have discovered the figure under the moody blues of the "Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto."

The work will be on display starting Friday at London’sCourtauld Gallery as part of "The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Goya to Impressionism. Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection.”

"We have long suspected another painting lay behind the portrait of De Soto because the surface of the work has telltale marks and textures of something below,” Barnaby Wright, deputy head of the Courtauld Gallery, said in a statement.

"You can even start to make out her shape just by looking at the painting with the naked eye,” he added.

"Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto,”depicting Picasso’s Spanish sculptor friend,was painted in 1901 during the Blue Period, which marked a shift in  Picasso’s visual language after the suicide of his close friend Carlos Casagemas.