Netherlands ? A team of European scientists unveiled on Wednesday in Amsterdam a new method for extracting images hidden under old masters’ paintings, recreating a color portrait of a woman’s face unseen since Vincent van Gogh painted over it in 1887.

Joris Dik, a materials scientist from Delft University, and Koen Janssens, a chemist from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, engineered a new method of visualizing hidden paintings, using high-intensity x-rays and an intimate knowledge of old pigments.

The pair used the new approach on “Patch of Grass,” a small oil study of a field that Van Gogh painted in Paris.

While not exact in every detail, the image produced is a woman’s head that may be the same model Van Gogh painted in a series of portraits leading up to the 1885 masterpiece “The Potato Eaters.”