For nearly 160 years, Cezanne’s painting had a secret hidden in plain sight.

Cincinnati Museum of Art chief restorer Serena Urri was conducting a trivial inspection of Paul Cezanne’s famous painting “Still Life with Bread and Eggs” when she noticed something “weird”.

For a work of art in 1865, the appearance of small cracks was not a surprise. But they were concentrated in two specific areas, and not distributed evenly across the canvas. Moreover, something white was visible from them, which sharply contrasted with the palette of the so-called “dark” period of the French artist’s work.

“I thought there might be something under it that we should look at,” Urry told CNN.

The restorer asked the local medical company to bring a portable x-ray machine to the museum, where a technician scanned the oil painting. When Urry digitally stitched together a series of images using Photoshop, she saw “white spots” that indicated the presence of more white lead pigment.

“I was trying to figure out what the hell it was…then I just turned it (90 degrees),” she recalls. “I said wow out loud.”

When the scanned image was rotated vertically, an image of a man appeared, his eyes, hairline and shoulders looked like dark spots. Given the position of the figure’s body, Urry and her museum colleagues believe it is Cezanne himself.

“I think everyone thinks that this is a self-portrait… He is posing for us, but his body is turned. If it was a portrait of someone other than himself, it would probably be completely frontal, ”the expert added.

If so, this would be one of the earliest recorded depictions of the artist, who was about 20 years old when the still life was completed. Cézanne is known to have produced over two dozen self-portraits, although almost all of them were completed after the 1860s and are mostly done in pencil.