Processed X-ray of Vincent van Gogh's Still life with meadow flowers and roses (1886)

Processed X-ray of Vincent van Gogh's Still life with meadow flowers and roses (1886) Vincent van Gogh’s 'Still life with meadow flowers and roses' (1886) is currently held in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, but hidden beneath the painting lies a secret work showing two wrestlers locked in combat. Vincent, in a letter to his brother Theo, in January 1886, wrote 'This week I painted a large thing with two nude torsos - two wrestlers … and I really like doing that', however the piece was never found. Only in 2012, when a team of researchers from TU Delft, Antwerp University, Deutsches Elektronen- Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum, performed x-ray studies, were the two wrestlers revealed. The motif is thought to have been painted by van Gogh whilst he was at the Antwerp Academy, and together with the documented reference of the painting in Vincent’s letters, the painting has been verified as an authentic van Gogh. As part of the development of our 3D printed Two Wrestlers NeoMaster, we processed the x-ray Vincent van Gogh's Still life with meadow flowers and roses (1886) to separate the exterior and interior pieces, leaving only the trace of the hidden interior piece, revealing the outline of the hidden boxers. Subsequently edge detection, AI stylisation, heightmap generation, and 3D printing were performed to generate lost work, the Two Wresters NeoMaster, which was shown in 2022 at the Louvre, and received international media attention from The Times, ArtNet, The Independent, and the BBC. This Research and Development piece is released as a limited set of 16 editions.