After examining the French artist Paul Gauguin’s The Little Cat with X-ray imaging, experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam are unraveling the painting’s secrets—including a hidden beetle.
A year before painting the self-portrait, Van Gogh had cut off his own ear after a row with his friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin, beginning a long spell in and out of hospitals and asylums.
The sense of melancholy radiating from the doctor conveys, Van Gogh wrote to his friend Paul Gauguin, the “heartbroken expression of our time”. Considered to be among his masterpieces ...