“View of Scheveningen Sands” by Hendrick van Anthonissen
For 140 years, “View of Scheveningen Sands” looked a lot different from the image you see above. It was hanging in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England from 1878 to 2014. For all that time, the painting just looked like a group of people staring at nothing. But in reality, they were all staring at a beached whale! In 2014, a conservator named Shan Kuange was restoring the painting, and she removed a coat of yellow varnish. This revealed the hidden beach whale, and it totally solved the mystery of what these people were looking at. Kuang said the crude overpaint, which filled in the sea and shore where the whale had been, could have been added “because the presence of a dead animal was considered offensive” in the 18th or early 19th centuries.