Experts find hidden dog in a Picasso masterpiece

STORY: There is a hidden dog in this Pablo Picasso artwork

It’s concealed under a thin layer of paint

Locator: New York

"If you look closely, you can see that there's this lingering ghost of the dog here. There's red paint showing through in areas. You can actually if you look really closely, you can see the eyes here and the ears here."

Modern imaging technology revealed a

visualization of the dog in ‘Le Moulin de la Galette’

(Julie Barten, Senior Painting Conservator, Guggenheim Museum)

“I had a very strong feeling that there was something under there." //

"What we know is that in many instances, Picasso painted aspects of the composition and then subsequently obliterated them and transformed them into into other compositional elements. This was really part of his practice.”

Picasso completed the painting in Paris in 1900

when he was 19 years old

It’s considered one of his early masterpieces

(Megan Fontanella, Modern Art Curator, Guggenheim Museum)

"When we found out that there was, in fact a dog underneath that brown form from this earlier composition that Picasso had rendered, my goodness, that was surprising for me, at least. It completely changes how one would have encountered this picture. You would have seen this really quite adorable dog in the foreground, looking almost directly at the visitor with this wonderful red bow. One can only speculate why Picasso would have concealed this. But certainly now my eye is drawn to all these wonderful figures in the composition."