This undated handout image provided by The Phillips Collection shows Picasso's "The Blue Room," painted in 1901. Scientists and art experts have found a hidden painting beneath it. Photo: AP Photo/The Phillips Collection

Now scientists and art experts are revealing they've found a hidden painting beneath the surface of one of Picasso's first masterpieces, "The Blue Room." Using advances in infrared imagery, they have uncovered a hidden portrait of a bow-tied man with his face resting on his hand.

Now the question that conservators at The Phillips Collection in Washington hope to answer is simply: Who is he?

It's a mystery that's fueling new research about the painting created early in Picasso's career while he was working in Paris at the start of his distinctive blue period of melancholy subjects.

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"When he had an idea, you know, he just had to get it down and realize it," Phillips curator Susan Behrends Frank told the AP, describing how Picasso had hurriedly painted "The Blue Room" over another complete picture." He could not afford to acquire new canvases every time he had an idea that he wanted to pursue. He worked sometimes on cardboard because canvas was so much more expensive."

###### Brushstrokes on the piece clearly don't match the composition that depicts a woman bathing in Picasso's studio.

A conservator noted the odd brushstrokes in a 1954 letter, but it wasn't until the 1990s that an X-ray of the painting first revealed a fuzzy image of something under the picture. It wasn't clear, though, that it was a portrait.

###### He's dressed in a jacket and bow tie, painted in a vertical composition.

"It's really one of those moments that really makes what you do special," said Patricia Favero, the conservator at The Phillips Collection who pieced together the best infrared image yet of the man's face.

"The second reaction was, 'Well, who is it?' We're still working on answering that question."

###### One possible figure is the Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who hosted Picasso's first show in 1901. But there's no documentation and no clues left on the canvas, so the research continues.

Over the past five years, experts from The Phillips Collection, National Gallery of Art, Cornell University and Delaware's Winterthur Museum have developed a clearer image of the mystery picture under the surface. ######

Since the portrait was discovered, conservators have been using other technology to scan the painting for further insights.]]>