22 September 2014

Hidden Face in Renoir Painting?

I have an app on my tablet called Jigsaw Puzzles that lets you do a jigsaw puzzle from any photograph you supply, or one of the built-in samples that the app comes with. I was working on a puzzle of Renoir's painting Woman at the Piano, which I'd seen and photographed at the Art Institute of Chicago. As it is a portrait orientation painting, and the app runs in landscape mode by default, I had started working on it with the woman rotated sideways. Doesn't matter much when you're just working on the edges and gathering like colors together. But that perspective caused me to notice something that I wouldn't have noticed if I'd been working at it upright.

The stool she's sitting on, when rotated 90 degrees clockwise, appears to have a hidden picture of a bearded man's face in it. What do you think?

Here's the original painting:

Now here's the seat cushion from the stool, rotated sideways and skewed a little bit, and enlarged:

Do you see the bearded man or am I crazy (like people who see Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich)? Could it be a signature self-portrait of Renoir himself hidden in the painting? I'm sure someone would have found it and commented on this before if so, but I can't find any reference to it online.

Anyway, it's interesting what you can see if you look at something familiar from an unusual perspective, and close up.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

absolutely images in art that are subliminal... DaVinci never painted a thing that didn't have a lot more going on than what was depicted... artists said things they were not allowed to say.... and few got it. hundreds of years later we recognized the messages expressed....

 

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