The secret in the 160-year-old painting has finally been decoded, surprising everyone.

During a routine inspection of Paul Cézanne's painting Still Life with Bread and Eggs , museum director Serena Urry noticed something strange.

For a work of art dating back to 1865, the presence of small cracks is not surprising. But they are concentrated in two specific areas, rather than being evenly distributed across the canvas. Notably, the cracks also reveal small white streaks that stand out against the brooding palette of the French artist's so-called "dark" period.

Paul Cézanne's "Still Life with Bread and Eggs" has been in the Cincinnati Art Museum's collection for nearly 70 years.

A local medical company was then asked to bring a portable X-ray machine to the museum to take pictures of different parts of the painting. When Urry digitally stitched the images together in Photoshop, she saw 'white spots' that showed more white lead pigment. After rotating the painting 90 degrees, the director exclaimed with joy.

When rotated vertically, the image of a man appears, his eyes, hairline and shoulders appearing as dark patches. Based on the position of the figure's body, Urry and his colleagues at the museum believe that it is Cézanne - the painter of the valuable painting .

She said, " Everyone assumed it was a self-portrait… He's posed in the way a self-portrait would be: in other words, he's looking at us, with his body turned. If it were a portrait of someone other than him, it would probably be full frontal ."

X-ray images have been flipped horizontally for side-by-side comparison.

If true, it would be one of the earliest recorded depictions of the artist. He would have been in his early 20s when the still life was completed. Cézanne is known to have created more than 20 self-portraits, although most were completed after the 1860s, most of them in pencil.

The museum's curators say they are in the process of exploring the portrait. They will now work with Cézanne experts around the world to conduct a technical analysis to better understand the portrait and how it was created. This information could help us understand a formative moment in the great artist's early career.

X-ray image, fully visible, shows the presence of lead white, used as a pigment

Still Life with Bread and Eggs, painted in the realistic style , was painted by Cézanne early in his career, drawing inspiration from the Spanish and Flemish Baroque periods. Many other questions remain unanswered: what colors Cézanne used and how complete his original portrait was.

Further scanning and analysis could require transporting the artwork to another institution, presenting logistical challenges and meaning museum visitors could miss out on seeing the precious painting.