Secret painting discovered behind famous The Pioneer masterpiece
It’s the famous Australian painting that’s hidden a secret under its paint strokes for 115 years — until an eagle-eyed curator spotted something amiss.
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A hidden masterpiece, lost more for more than 100 years, has been found under one of Australia’s most famous paintings.
In one of the biggest discoveries in Australian art history, the Sunday Herald Sun can reveal the Frederick McCubbin classic painting The Pioneer has for 115 years hidden another masterpiece – a long lost painting called, Found.
The National Gallery of Victoria uncovered the secret during COVID in mid October when the gallery’s head of conservation shone a torch on The Pioneer and noticed a shadow on the central panel of painting.
X-rays confirmed the lost masterpiece has been hidden in plain sight for 115 years. Millions have “viewed” it.
They just didn’t know it was there, hidden under the Australian classic, valued at tens of millions of dollars McCubbin’s decision to paint over Found may have gone unnoticed except for the detective work of the NGV’s head of conservation, Michael Varcoe-Cocks.
Varcoe-Cocks was checking artworks in the deserted galleries as part of his COVID duties on a Friday afternoon in mid October.
It was spooky work, he said, a “tragic privilege” to admire paintings deprived all other patrons in the silent blackness of lockdown.
He paused at The Pioneer, one of his favourite paintings.
“I was looking at it, taking a little moment for myself, and then I saw this bit of texture, this shadow of a form,” he said.
He only noticed a curved line through the lower half of The Pioneer’s middle panel because he was working with a torch in darkness.
Under lights, the line is barely discernible. It served no obvious purpose in the finished Pioneer work of 1904.
The observation, like a scene from The Da Vinci code, was a first clue in a tangled puzzle.
Varcoe-Cocks wondered if McCubbin, as many artists do, had painted over an earlier work. Then he remembered.
He had X-rayed The Pioneer in 2013. And he’d seen something in the x-ray at the time.
He rushed back to his research area and found the digital images. They clearly showed McCubbin’s unusual application with the edge of a card or a palette knife.
Yet X-rayed art, a common practice in art restoration, is difficult to interpret, given layers upon layers of paint.
This x-ray had revealed shapes not visible in the final work.
But it had not resolved clear images.
Varcoe-Cocks went home for the weekend. He pondered the clues.
”I thought I’d seen this form somewhere before,” Varcoe-Cocks said. He just didn’t know where.
He had studied McCubbin’s scrap book in 2019 for an upcoming exhibition. His lightning bolt realisation hit on the following Tuesday. Gifted with an unusually astute visual memory, he had seen the form, he sensed, in McCubbin’s scrap book.
Within its yellowed pages, among family photos and copies of other artists’ works, McCubbin had pinned a black-and-white photo of Found to a right-hand page.
This small and faded image was the critical clue. There is no other photo of Found thought to exist.
The sapling on that painting’s left side matched the sapling in The Pioneer’s middle panel.
The vegetation at the panel’s bottom appeared to match in both paintings.
Most importantly, perhaps, was the long curved line which traced the back of the life-sized bushman in Found as he leant over a limp child.
The ghostly outline depicted in The Pioneer x-ray vaguely resembled a worker in full Personal Protective Equipment. Varcoe-Cocks compared it with images of Found and The Pioneer.
Outlines of the bushie’s hat, and his arm, in Found could be identified in the x-ray. The PPE effect of the x-ray was conjured by the bushie’s beard.
“I digitally overlaid this to that,” he said. “It was a perfect match.”
It was his Eureka moment. He had found Found. It had been lost to The Pioneer.
“It’s always a remarkable and wonderful thing to solve an otherwise unsolved mystery,” he said.
“There’s a great sense of relief, that you can put the file aside of a missing artwork.
“Then I started to realise the implications of what Found actually was. It was the origin of The Pioneer.”
Found was critically acclaimed when it was exhibited in the 1893 Victorian Artists’ Society exhibition.
But no one paid the asking price of 250 guineas, more than an annual wage in economically depressed times.
It was believed the painting may have been later sold privately, then somehow lost over the following century.
It was odd that such a major statement artwork simply disappeared.
“If it had survived, it would have been an incredibly imposing work to have stood in front of,” Varcoe-Cocks said.
“It would have been one of McCubbin’s major masterpieces, for sure.”
The discovery of McCubbin’s submerging of the painting for another suggests The Pioneer was painted in a process of evolution and experimentation.
Five generations of schoolchildren have viewed The Pioneer, a time-lapsed series of a changing landscape.
The paintings are embedded in Australian heritage.
Varcoe-Cocks’ grandmother boasted the images on table place mats.
McCubbin, along with his friend Tom Roberts, led an impressionist movement which depicted the Australian bush during the Federation era, when nation building was a preoccupation.
McCubbin was born in Melbourne in 1855. Unlike most successful artists of the era, he never left to paint elsewhere. Known to his art students as “Prof”, he told friends of the great burden of The Pioneer in the months he painted it.
“McCubbin was fascinated with the Australian bush and returned to this theme repeatedly throughout his career,” said NGV director Tony Ellwood.
“Not only does this discovery solve a great mystery in Australian art history, but it also provides insight into the mind of one of our greatest artists, who, perhaps in a moment of inspiration, has chosen to explore a new idea by reworking an existing canvas.’
Dr Angela Hesson, the NGV’s Curator of Australian Art (to 1980) said finding a lost work was always rare and exciting.
“But this painting by one of Australia’s most celebrated artists is a particularly important find,” she said. “That the appropriately-titled Found should have been hanging on our walls undiscovered for so long, just beneath the surface of one of the NGV’s most beloved paintings, is truly remarkable”.
Varcoe-Cocks agreed that his discovery was most unlikely.
“If I wasn’t walking through in the dark, with a torch, on my own, I probably wouldn’t have had time to focus on it, make the connection and revisit the x-ray and to rediscover this little photo in a scrap book we had in storage,” he said.
“It was a true COVID moment.”
The NGV, including The Pioneer, reopens from restrictions on Monday. The Pioneer will be a centrepiece of an exhibition of Australian impressionist artists, which opens in April.
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