An Expert Looked Closer At A 100-Year-Old Masterpiece And Found It Was Hiding An Astounding Secret

That room the man was exploring is in the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne. And the picture he was examining is one of Australia’s most famous works of art. It’s been in the NGV since 1906, having been left to the museum by a charity all those years ago.

The man lurking around was not a thief. He was Michael Varcoe-Cocks, who works in the museum as its head of conservation. He’s an expert in paintings from the second half of the 19th century, meaning he can tell you a lot about the works on display. But even with his vast knowledge of art, Varcoe-Cocks couldn’t have predicted what he would find.

The picture that had caught Varcoe-Cocks’ eye? That was The Pioneer by the Australian artist Frederick McCubbin. The work – created in 1904 – is considered to be one of the great Australian paintings. The NGV even goes so far as to describe The Pioneer as a “masterpiece.”

Varcoe-Cocks is no doubt familiar with The Pioneer, and he’s likely run his eye over it many times over his years at the museum. But in the dark gallery, his flashlight caught a detail he’d never noticed before. And after the expert had gotten over his shock, he began to make sense of what he was seeing. Turns out that this McCubbin was crafty in more ways than one...

There’s nothing in McCubbin’s life story to suggest he was good at hiding secrets. In fact, at first, there was nothing to suggest he’d even become a great artist. As a young man in Melbourne, he had a series of ordinary jobs: working alongside his father, as a baker and as an attorney’s clerk. For a while, he even painted coaches. But art was his abiding passion, and so he somehow found the time to study at the NGV’s School of Design.

And when the 25-year-old McCubbin made his first sale, he was up and running. That led to several prizes, and by the middle of the 1880s he had begun the work that would make his name: depictions of the Australian bush. All this led McCubbin full circle. Towards the end of the decade, he headed up the school where he had learned to paint.

Then, as the century turned, McCubbin felt the pull of the bush. The painter took his family to live in Mount Macedon near Melbourne, and there he started to discover the different colors that the wilderness of the Macedon Ranges had to offer.

Ultimately, of course, this all led to The Pioneer. But McCubbin was a bit of a groundbreaker himself. You see, in the latter half of the 19th century, Australia had seen an influx of European artists, who had shared their knowledge of the “plein air” style of painting. They in turn sparked an Australian version of Impressionism that used the bush as inspiration – and McCubbin was one of the proponents of this trend.

The Australian Impressionists focused on tones that seemed native to Australia. They painted the barren, waterless soil, the forests of eucalyptus trees and the sand. And as Australia moved from British rule to becoming its own commonwealth, these artists captured a life that was disappearing as times changed.

It turned out that Mount Macedon was the perfect environment for McCubbin to do great work. Inspired by the bush, he created The Pioneer in 1904. And while it isn’t McCubbin’s only painting of the Australian countryside, it’s arguably one of his finest.

The Pioneer depicts the lives of a family of settlers, showing through its three panels the changes that they experience in the Victorian bush. And despite his reputation as an impressionist, McCubbin paints the clan with almost photographic realism.

In the left panel, the viewer can see a man and his spouse newly arrived in the bush. Australian settlers of the 1860s were allowed to snap up land in some of the colonies, and in this case it seems to be a patch of uncleared forest. McCubbin paints this in muted, fall tones.

The settler is kindling a fire in the background of the picture, near to where he has parked the wagon that brought them there. His wife, on the other hand? She’s in the foreground, and frankly she doesn’t look too happy! Perhaps she’s just thinking about the hard work that lies ahead for both of them.

But in the middle panel, it’s clear that some time has passed. There’s a third member of the family, you see, as the woman is cradling an infant. And the man can be seen sitting on a log that he must have cut – along with many others. Through the gap in the trees caused by this clearing, we can spy the family’s home.

In the right panel, though, we see that the clock has again been ticking. Now through the much larger gap in the trees, there’s a city. And in the foreground, a grown man is on his knees by a grave. Perhaps he is the infant, now a strapping young fellow. We don’t know whose grave it is, either, but neither the settler nor his wife is depicted here – which could tell us something.

And when you see The Pioneer as a whole, you may see why it’s been labeled a masterpiece. Not everyone liked it at the time it was created, though. In fact, it remained unsold for a while! But one of McCubbin’s friends had a solution: make the city in the last panel look like Melbourne. Once McCubbin had done that, the painting was bought.

As for the painting itself, you should know that it was created only a few years after Australia became a commonwealth. It could be seen, then, as showing pride in the legacy of the pioneers who had arrived on the nation’s shores. They had battled against the wild bush and built the thriving cities that even then were visible on Australia’s coast.

Even so, it’s possible to see a different story in The Pioneer. The settler woman in the first panel does not appear happy about her prospects. Perhaps that shows off the less appealing side of pioneering life. Basically, it’s hard. And that final frame? Maybe it’s suggesting that the settler’s son will soon leave his childhood home for the city.

Whatever McCubbin’s true intention, though, The Pioneer sits in the NGV, where it’s much loved by visitors. And when Varcoe-Cocks was walking through the deserted gallery room, checking that everything was okay, he found something else that elevates this artwork even further. There’s a strange figure behind all the paint – and it looks like McCubbin deliberately hid it.

It was the fall of 2020, and the museum was closed to the public when Varcoe-Cocks was wandering around in the darkness. Speaking to the Australian TV show Sunrise, he later explained, “I was doing the rounds during lockdown, walking around with a [flashlight] checking all of the paintings. [Then] I came past the very famous The Pioneer.” And what happened next set in train a series of events that would rock the Australian art world.

The beam of the conservation expert’s flashlight strayed over something that caught his eye. He described this to Sunrise as being “a form in the texture that didn’t relate to that final composition.” And it immediately sparked his curiosity. Just what in the heck was he looking at?

Well, it turned out that Varcoe-Cocks had access to X-rays of the painting made back in 2013. And while looking closely at these scans, he could see that there was something in The Pioneer he hadn’t noticed before. But even at this point, he couldn’t completely unravel the mystery.

The now-visible outline nagged at Varcoe-Cocks. He’d spotted it somewhere before, but where? Then he remembered. In a scrapbook that McCubbin had kept, there was a photo – small and colorless – of the painting Found. This work features a bushman alongside a child, and the art expert could have sworn that he had seen that image in The Pioneer.

Varcoe-Cocks told Sunrise, “I could see this big form of a bushman holding a little child, a limp figure, who has just been found in the bush.” Then the head of conservation realized that beneath The Pioneer, there was another masterpiece by McCubbin – previously lost for a century under a cloak of paint.

So, the next stage was for Varcoe-Cocks to confirm what he now believed. He told the Melbourne newspaper the Herald Sun, “I digitally overlaid this to that. It was a perfect match.” The expert added, “It’s always a remarkable and wonderful thing to solve an otherwise unsolved mystery.” We bet!

But the discovery is a bittersweet one. That hidden painting can’t actually be taken out of The Pioneer, as McCubbin created his masterpiece right on top of it. One of the benefits of oil paints is that they can be layered to change or hide details. And while that’s a good thing for artists, it’s a bummer for any folks wanting to see McCubbin’s lost work in its entirety.

McCubbin was by no means alone in creating new pieces on top of old ones. Pablo Picasso did exactly the same when he found that he didn’t have the money to buy fresh canvases. And it looks as though we’re still discovering the master’s secrets. In 2020 it was revealed that Picasso’s much-loved Cubist Still Life from 1922 covered an earlier still image in the neo-classical style.

For McCubbin, meanwhile, layering paint was just part of his process. He’d create a piece with a lot of detail and then daub more paint on top or rub it off until he felt the work was completed. That means McCubbin’s oeuvre features a lot of what is known as pentimenti, or remnants of earlier paintings.

But Varcoe-Cocks knew just how lucky he’d been to make his discovery. He said to the Herald Sun, “If I wasn’t walking through in the dark, with a [flashlight] on my own, I probably wouldn’t have had time to focus on it, make the connection and revisit the X-ray and to rediscover this little photo in a scrapbook we had in storage.”

That’s not the normal method for finding pentimenti. Experts usually uncover them through hi-tech methods such as infrared reflectography. This allows a greater amount of light to pass through any surface layer of paint and illuminate what lies beneath.

Tech proved really useful, too, when NGV art scientist Raye Collins was looking at another painting back in 2007. And yet again, it was another work by McCubbin. This one was called The Letter, and it was being displayed in the town of Ballarat.

The Letter shows a lady walking by a river while gazing at a note that she has in her hands – perhaps something from a lover. And Collins had been X-raying the art in the hope of uncovering some of McCubbin’s earlier work underneath. She was successful, too, spotting another still image beneath the paint.

The hidden likeness is thought to be something McCubbin painted as a student. Collins told the Australian newspaper The Courier-Mail, “We were very surprised to find this still [painting] underneath. It’s very significant; it helps us build this whole story about the painting, and the painting also tells us a lot about the National Gallery School.”

The X-ray revealed what could be two bowls and a basket, along with what is clearly a flower. Speaking about this to The Courier-Mail, Collins added, “This is good new information that really adds to people’s understanding. What is really interesting is that it’s completely different [from the visible painting].”

And McCubbin’s pentimenti were exposed again in 2015 when the Australian Synchrotron – which produces extremely bright light – shone on his The North Wind. Underneath the arid scene depicted in the 1888 masterpiece lies a different landscape, this time lush and green. It’s thought McCubbin may have made the change to reflect the imagined hardships of the settlers.

So, McCubbin definitely has form! Circling back to The Pioneer, though, Varcoe-Cocks would not say whether he believed his discovery would add to the monetary value of the painting. Not that this really matters, as it’s already worth millions of dollars. But the hidden image does add an extra dimension to the masterpiece. As Varcoe-Cocks told Sunrise, The Pioneer “culturally has many more layers to it now.”

It’s not that Found was worthless in its own right. In 1893 McCubbin showed the work at the Victorian Artists’ Society Exhibition, where it received praise from folks in attendance. But none of the people who liked it would pay what McCubbin was asking for. That explains why he eventually decided to put the canvas to new use.

Varcoe-Cocks certainly believes that’s what happened. He told Sky News that McCubbin hadn’t wanted to waste the canvas, and so he ultimately decided to paint The Pioneer on that same surface. Varcoe-Cocks added, “It became one idea. It merged into this really major epic sort of work of The Pioneer.”

And for the museum head, finding McCubbin’s lost painting did more than just help explain what had happened to Found. Varcoe-Cocks explained to the Herald Sun, “I started to realize the implications of what Found actually was. It was the origin of The Pioneer.” Now, he’ll never look at McCubbin’s work in the same way again.