Reconstructing Atlantic City.

A Painted Reconstruction of a section of Atlantic City.

The X-ray of 'Praxitella' revealed a great deal of the composition of 'Atlantic City'. To discover more about how the work looked originally, including its array of colours, tiny samples of paint were taken from the edges of the painting and analysed using a microscope and other specialised equipment to establish their chemical makeup. This gave a much clearer understanding of how the paint was layered and the striking range of pigments used by Helen Saunders.

These samples only allowed identification of the pigments used in limited areas of the painting. To find out more about the composition and colours of 'Atlantic City', a recently developed technique called scanning macro x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (MA-XRF) was used to map chemical elements in the paint, associated with different coloured pigments. Mapping the presence of each element, made it possible to deduce the pigments used and to reconstruct the original colours of the composition.

An unexpected issue arose when the layer of thick white paint used to cover over 'Atlantic City' before painting 'Praxitella' blocked the signals for the chemical elements underneath. An alternative, scanning the painting from the back, in two sections was employed and the maps produced show the chemical elements present in the pigments used by Saunders.

The reconstructed section here incorporates the distribution of iron (present in the blue pigment), arsenic (green), and mercury (red). The maps also gave some indication of Saunders' brush work and the way she blended her colours to create forms. The evidence suggests that 'Atlantic City' was a brightly coloured, richly painted and visually striking work.

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Wyndham Lewis said it took him the strength of seventeen water buffaloes to paint Praxitella, one of the most iconic and enigmatic 'portraits' of the early 20th century. Over 100 years after it was first shown in the exhibition 'Portraits and Tyros' in 1921, Lewis's painting was subject to investigation at Courtauld Conservation which revealed startling outcomes. This focused exhibition tells that story, the people involved in its making, some whose voices have been eclipsed, and looks at the wider social terrain to ask how it affects its meaning for us today.

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The story of how a lost masterpiece was hidden for more than 100 years under another famous 20th Century painting is being told in Leeds.

Atlantic City depicted an abstract vision of a modern city. It was discovered in 2019 under Praxitella, by Percy Wyndham Lewis, the founder of the short-lived Vorticists movement.

Two students at the Courtauld Department of Conservation in London, used X-ray analysis to find it. Praxitella has been part of the collection at Leeds Art Gallery since 1945, and was created by Wyndham Lewis in around 1921.

A spokesperson for the gallery said subtle clues, including raised paint lines and tiny surface cracks, led experts to believe there might be a second painting underneath it. However, with no way of knowing for sure the concealed composition's true nature remained a mystery.

That was until Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn were researching Praxitella, which was on loan from Leeds Art Gallery, and found Atlantic City, by Helen Saunders, the artwork which had been a secret for so long.