When Jean Francois Millet’s dramatic picture The Captivity of the Jews in Babylon was unveiled in the late 1840s it was vilified by public and critics alike.
The Paris critics thought the picture’s surface was too heavily encrusted with paint, and at least one of them complained about the undue savagery of the scene. ‘The soldiers are pressing the Jewish women… with more violence than is necessary,’ he wrote. ‘They behave as if they were attacking or sacking a city.’
The picture then vanished from sight and art experts assumed that Millet had destroyed it. In the winter of 1983, however, art restorers at the Museums of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, used X-ray radiography to reveal the presence of another picture under the surface of Millet’s portrait The Young Shepherdess.
The X-ray picture showed the image of Millet’s ‘long lost’ and controversial Captivity. It is now assumed that, far from destroying the picture, Millet reused the canvas more than 20 years later when art materials were in short supply during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1.
Picture Credit : Google