A hidden portrait of a man has been discovered beneath Pablo Picasso’s 1901 masterpiece The Blue Room.

Researchers from The Phillips Collection, National Gallery of Art, Cornell University and Delaware’s Winterthur Museum used infra-red imagery to uncover the image of the man, who is shown wearing a bow-tie, as reported by AP.

Art curators have theorised about another image beneath the paint of The Blue Room for years, and an X-ray in the 1990s demonstrated that there was an image there, but it is only with this recent infra-red imaging that the image of a man wearing a bow-tie has been discovered.

Picasso may have simply been reusing a canvas as they were expensive at the time, but the mystery continues as to the identity of the man in the picture.