RESEARCH ARTICLE New insights into René Magritte's early surrealist painting La salle d'armes Catherine Defeyt 1,2 | Francisca Vandepitte 2 | Elodie Herens 1 | David Strivay 1 1 Centre Européen d'Archéométrie, UR Art, Archéologie, Patrimoine, Universitéde Liège, Liège, Belgium 2 Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium Correspondence Catherine Defeyt, Centre Européen d'Archéométrie, UR AAP, Sart Tilman B15, Université de Liège, B-4000 Liège, Belgium. Email: catherine.defeyt@uliege.be Funding information Belgian Federal Science Policy Office, Grant/Award Number: FED- tWIN2019-prf060 Painted in 1925 or 1926, over an older composition, La salle d'armes, is among the first Magritte's surrealist paintings. It is also one of the only four Magritte's using enamels reported in the René Magritte Catalog Raisonné. This paper presents the material and technical study conducted on this double painting. The complementary imaging and analytical methods applied for this purpose provided substantial information on both, the visible image and the hidden one. Concerning the latter, for instance, the obtained results permitted to iden- tify a cubo-futurist oil painting from the very early 1920s. KEYWORDS double painting, enamels, MA-XRF, pigments, René Magritte 1 | INTRODUCTION After a cubo-futuristic period in the early 1920s, René Magritte began to develop a more personal and poetic imagery. Numerous novel items that will later become emblematic of Magritte's surrealism, including stereo- graphic double portraits, red curtains, bilboquets, and heads without body, were first introduced in composi- tions dating from 1925 or 1926. Painted in 1925 or 1926, La salle d'armes (Figure 1) is considered as one of the earliest Magritte's surrealist paintings [1] . The plaster head, appearing for the first time here, will give rise to iconic surrealist paintings, such as L'homme célèbre, Le Visage du Génie, Le Mariage de minuit and La Forêt, all executed between 1926 and 1927. In the same way, the table, displayed in La salle d'armes will be included in several paintings made after- ward, that is L'oasis, La traversée difficile, La naissance de l'idole, and Le marriage de minuit, all dated 1926. In addition, La salle d'armes shows typical signs of re- used painting substrates, chiefly reliefs of underlying pat- terns without connection with the current image (Figure 2). The current composition has been well exe- cuted over a former picture, painted itself on a recycled burlap bag. In view of that, La salle d'armes does not only crystallize the early stages of Magritte's surrealism; it also testifies of the material insecurity the painter had to face during his early career. Indeed, David Sylvester has pointed out the relationship between Magritte's financial difficulties persisting until the late 1940s and the fact the painter had routinely recycled the canvas supports from older paintings, this until at least 1935. 1 La salle d'armes presents an additional technical specificity; it is one of the only four Magritte's paintings that involve enamel paints. 2 Therefore, the material and technical study of this singular work, formerly belonging to the Max Janlet col- lection, 3 seemed to be of considerable interest and must be undertaken. That is why La salle d'armes, which was housed by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB) for a long time, has been investigated in the framework of the research project Magritte on practice (2015–2018) consisting on the in situ investigation of 50 oil paintings and 10 gouaches made by the artist between 1920 and 1967, and housed by the Magritte Museum (RMFAB). This paper presents the outcomes achieved in regard with the style, the subject, the date, and the palette of the Received: 29 April 2020 Revised: 20 November 2021 Accepted: 23 November 2021 DOI: 10.1002/xrs.3277 X-Ray Spectrom. 2021;1–7. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/xrs © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1