Masterpieces in Draft

Key concepts

Every work — at a glance

• Mona Lisa — Leonardo da Vinci (painting)

  Leonardo's Louvre portrait of Lisa Gherardini, and the disputed 'Isleworth' Mona Lisa — a younger-looking second version some call his earlier draft, others a later copy.

• Bedroom in Arles (Three Versions) — Vincent van Gogh (painting)

  Three nearly identical paintings of Van Gogh's simple bedroom — the 1888 original (later flood-damaged) and two 1889 copies — clashing lilac walls, yellow furniture and a red blanket to 'express absolute repose'.

• Despair (1892) and the Scream (1893) — Edvard Munch (painting)

  Despair shows a melancholy man leaning on a railing under a blood-red sky, looking away; The Scream keeps the same setting but turns the figure into a faceless face confronting you, hands to its head.

• Dance (I) (1909) and Dance (II) (1910) — Henri Matisse (painting)

  Dance (I) is a paler, study-like first version of figures joined in a ring; Dance (II), made a year later for the collector Shchukin, intensifies it into vivid red dancers against deep blue and green.

• The Isleworth Mona Lisa — Leonardo da Vinci (disputed) (painting)

  The rival Mona Lisa: same pose, a younger woman, two columns the Louvre painting lacks — and on canvas, which Leonardo hardly used.

• Raphael's Young Woman on a Balcony — Raphael (drawing)

  A sketch from about 1505 showing the Mona Lisa pose between two columns, which is the strongest argument that a version with columns once existed.

• The Layer Amplification Method — Pascal Cotte (method)

  Cotte's light-and-camera technique, which in 2015 found an unsmiling earlier sitter under the Mona Lisa — a draft, Martin Kemp replied, not a hidden painting.

• The Rhone Flood (event)

  The reason there are three Bedrooms: water damaged the first while Van Gogh was hospitalised, so he painted it again at full size and then smaller.

• The Trapezoid Bedroom (detail)

  The real room had an obtuse corner on the left and an acute one on the right, so the painting's leaning walls report the room rather than a mistake.

• The Violet Walls (detail)

  Van Gogh wrote that the walls were pale lilac; the pigment faded and they now read blue, so the finished painting kept changing after he stopped.

• The Poet and the Lover (detail)

  The 1888 Bedroom hangs portraits of two friends on the wall — Eugene Boch and Paul-Eugene Milliet — and the later versions change them.

• Sick Mood at Sunset — Edvard Munch (title)

  The title Despair carried when it was first shown in 1892, when the figure still looked like Munch and the picture was about one man's evening.

• The Sketch on the Back — Edvard Munch (detail)

  A rudimentary sketch sits on the reverse of the board The Scream is painted on, and the front is signed twice, one signature over the other.

• Can Only Be Painted by a Madman — Edvard Munch (inscription)

  The pencil line in the top corner of The Scream, long blamed on a vandal, which infrared and handwriting analysis traced to Munch in 2020.

• The Prose Poem — Edvard Munch (note)

  Munch wrote the picture out in words in a notebook before he painted it — two friends, a railing, a blood-red sky, an infinite scream through nature.

• The Broken Ring — Henri Matisse (detail)

  The dancers' hands part at the front of the circle, and the gap falls over a knee so the run of colour never breaks — kept in both versions.

• The Shchukin Staircase (commission)

  Shchukin ordered two panels in March 1909, Dance and Music, for the staircase of his Moscow mansion, where they hung until the 1917 revolution.

• The Cartoon (method)

  An artist's full-size drawing of the finished work, made at the real dimensions so the design is settled before any paint is committed.

• Pouncing (method)

  Prick pinholes along a cartoon's outlines, hold it to the surface and pat soot through: the design lands as a dotted guide to paint along.

• The Raphael Cartoons — Raphael (drawings)

  Working drawings handed to weavers and meant to be used up, now among the most prized objects in London — the draft outlived its purpose.

What to know

1. 01
   How much does a work change between versions? Often the decisive move is subtraction: Munch reached The Scream by deleting the man's face, and with it any way to stand outside the feeling and watch someone else have it. 'Finished' turns out to be a decision, not a property of the object — Van Gogh's three Bedrooms are all complete paintings, and only history calls two of them studies.

Across subjects