X-rays, AI, and 3D printing revive long-lost Van Gogh pieces

Two UCL academics recreated a “lost” work of art by the renowned Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh 135 years after he painted over it using X-rays, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing.

With the help of the artist Jesper Eriksson, Ph.D. students Anthony Bourached (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology) and George Cann (UCL Space and Climate Physics) used cutting-edge technology to recreate a Van Gogh painting that had been lost for a long time.

It’s the most recent recreation in their “NeoMasters” series, a project they’ve been working on since 2019 to revive vanished works of art.

They created a method for recreating lost works that makes use of 3D printing, AI, and X-ray imaging to see through every layer of paint and determine the artist’s style.

When art specialists at the University of Antwerp looked into whether the painting “Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses” was a genuine Van Gogh, they first stumbled upon the concealed image in 2012. The two ghostly figures had been painted over, but X-rays let the researchers who were studying the art see through the layers of paint.

Aside from the subject matter being a popular theme at the Antwerp Art Academy, where Van Gogh was a student in 1886, the covered wrestlers featured brushstrokes and colors that were distinctive to Van Gogh.

In a letter to his brother Theo in January 1886, Van Gogh stated, “This week I painted a gigantic picture with two nude torsos—two wrestlers… and I truly liked painting that.”

In order to build an outline of the figures from the X-ray data, Bourached and Cann created a set of algorithms that recognized the edges. The style of the painting’s colors, details, and brushstrokes were then predicted using a neural network that had been trained on hundreds of other Van Gogh paintings. The crew built the finished piece of art using a 3D printer.

The team was able to recover other photos that had been thought to be lost for a long time using identical image analysis and manufacturing approaches. In 2021, the team tried to copy a painting that had been covered up of a naked woman crouched under Pablo Picasso’s painting “The Blind Man’s Meal.”

This most recent work, titled “The Two Wrestlers,” features two shirtless wrestlers squabbling against an undefined background. It is a recreation of a Van Gogh painting in which the two figures were hidden when the artist used the same canvas to create an unrelated picture of flowers.

According to Bourached, a researcher at UCL who studies machine learning and behavioral neuroscience, “At this stage, it is impossible to determine how closely it resembles the original painting because the data is missing. It’s definitely the best guess we can make given the state of technology, in my opinion. “