When Bazille was dissatisfied with his work or short of funds, he regularly recycled used canvases to paint new pictures. This was not an uncommon practice, but the frequency with which Bazille did so has only recently come to light.

With the help of the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France (C2RMF) and the laboratories at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and other American museums, nearly half of Bazille’s known works have been x-rayed and a dozen lost compositions rediscovered to date. Four of these hidden compositions are presented here with a tool that allows you to scroll back and forth between the painting on the surface and the composition underneath made visible through x-radiography.

This curious painting is comprised of two separate and distinct compositions: a scene of two women seated out of doors, their skirts visible in the lower half of the canvas, and a figure of a male nude reclining in a landscape that was painted directly over the earlier composition, obscuring its top half. Presumably, Bazille intended to complete the second composition but it remained unfinished at the time of his death.

When Bazille reused a canvas, he usually did not apply a new ground layer to cover over the earlier composition. Instead, he would rotate the canvas 90 or 180 degrees, changing its original orientation before starting anew. Here a vertical composition showing a bust-length portrait of a man was turned on its side and covered over by a new painting of a woman carrying a basket of flowers in a horizontal format.