For over 300 years , this scene plant by Dutch mountain lion Hendrick van Anthonissen appeared to be nothing more than a depicting of a daylight at the beach . But just a few layers of paint deep , it had a secret : A elephantine portrait of a beached whale .
Top image : Scheveningen Sands ( station restitution ) by Hendrick van Anthonissen , on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum /University of Cambridge
Shan Kuang , a grad student at the Hamilton Kerr Institute , was removing a layer of varnish from the house painting as part of a workaday cleaning when she was surprised to see what looked like the silhouette of a giant V go up out from the middle of the sea .
As conservator continued to despoil away layer and layer of paint , the figure was revealed to be much , much larger , stretching out of the ocean and into the sand . It was , unmistakably , a beached heavyweight . So what is the whale doing there and why was it hidden in the first place ?
Intriguingly , Anthonissen left every other aspect of the house painting — admit the gang of on - stunner besiege the hulk — precisely as is . Only the whale itself was disappear , a decision that may have been the event of a via media between the artist ’s visual modality and 17th 100 societal Thomas More . “ Over the C , ” says Kuang , “ the attitude towards painting has interchange . In the yesteryear it would be very common to cut a painting or to paint over it to fit aesthetic purposes . ”
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