How much is a masterpiece that no one can see actually worth?
It may sound like a silly question but it is one puzzling an art collector who paid £8,500 for a work by a controversial modern artist. An X-ray photograph taken at a local hospital has revealed that beneath the self-portrait by the late Robert Lenkiewicz is a far more valuable picture of a tramp.
Lenkiewicz painted over the portrait of the tramp and re-used the canvas. Since his death in 2002 his tramp paintings have become hot property and this one is valued at around £50,000, even though it would require extensive and expensive restoration to reveal it.
The self-portrait’s hidden secret was found after the collector took the painting to his local hospital on the advice of an art expert. Lenkiewicz, from Plymouth, died of a heart attack, aged 60 and all but penniless. The year after his death his collection of art was auctioned for around £2 million, a fraction of what it would be worth today.
Part of the artist’s notoriety came with the discovery of the embalmed body of an elderly tramp in a specially constructed drawer in his Plymouth studio. The tramp was 72-year-old Edwin McKenzie, whom Lenkiewicz used as a regular subject and nicknamed Diogenes. His whereabouts since his death in the 1980s had been a mystery despite rumours that the artist had carried on painting him long after he had vanished.