X-Rays Reveal a Tiny 19th-Century Beetle Embedded in a Paul Gauguin Painting

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.

When the Post-Impressionist artist was working on the piece, the doomed beetle somehow made its way into his paint, becoming stuck to the canvas. Measuring only about one millimeter, its remains weren’t spotted until now.

The researchers aren’t sure what kind of beetle it is. As they tell Artnet’s Eileen Kinsellam, “it is lying on its back, the head and legs broken off.”

The analysis also revealed that The Little Cat was originally a part of a larger Gauguin painting. Museum experts found that threads around the canvas had been cusped, or stretched into arched shapes, on three of the work’s sides.

The fourth side bears no such markings, suggesting “that the canvas was cut off at the right side, probably by Gauguin himself,” according to a statement from the museum.

Gauguin painted The Little Cat in 1888, when he was visiting Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France. The artists lived together in the now-iconic “Yellow House” during a turbulent two-month period. “Discussions about art became more frequent, and sometimes heated,” per the Van Gogh Museum’s website. “Vincent found it important to work from reality. Gauguin painted from memory, from his imagination.”

That December, van Gogh famously cut off his left ear, and Gauguin returned to Paris. But before their brief collaboration came to an end, the two artists influenced and challenged each other.

“[Gauguin is] often characterized as confident and someone to whom van Gogh looked up,” says Joost van der Hoeven, a researcher at the museum, per the Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey. “But maybe the relationship was more one of equals.”

According to the museum, Gauguin was particularly impressed by van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which inspired him to “[start] work on his own yellow still life.”

“Vincent wrote to his brother Theo that Gauguin was ‘working on … a big still life of an orange pumpkin and some apples and white linen on a yellow background and foreground,’” per the statement. “This quote is intriguing, as a ‘big still life’ by Gauguin is unknown.”

The Little Cat happens to have an orange pumpkin and a yellow background. As such, experts think it may have belonged to the larger canvas that van Gogh once described.

Another clue can be found in an 1888 portrait that van Gogh made of his friend: It shows Gauguin working on a yellow canvas featuring a spherical orange object—echoing elements of The Little Cat and demonstrating the artists’ influence on each other. Experts say that van Gogh’s portrait was also cut down, though nobody knows why.

“It may be that he was dissatisfied with the picture, but wanted to save the image of Gauguin, either for possible copying or simply as a memento of their time working together in Arles,” writes the Art Newspaper. “But another possibility is that Gauguin disliked his failed still life being depicted and asked van Gogh to cut it out.”

Julia Binswanger | READ MORE

Julia Binswanger is a freelance arts and culture reporter based in Chicago. Her work has been featured in WBEZ, Chicago magazine, Rebellious magazine and PC magazine.