Narrator: Magritte launched his career as a Surrealist with his first one-person exhibition in Brussels in 1927. The Menaced Assassin was one of the largest works he showed, and evidence suggests that he may have hurried to complete it in time.
Conservator, Michael Duffy: We examined the painting with x-ray imagery, and it does seem like it was painted very quickly with these broad horizontal brushstrokes in the foreground and broad vertical brushstrokes in the background. You can tell that he left space for the figures, and then he went in and painted each individual figure into the background space.
Details like the lines in the floorboard show a certain attention to perspective, but they don't actually converge on a vanishing point like they would in a Renaissance painting. So he's not strictly adhering to a certain perspective. He's twisting it in a way that, I think, makes it more interesting.
Narrator: When conservators removed a discolored synthetic varnish applied in the late 1960s, they discovered glossy black highlights in the bowler hats of the two men flanking the doorway.
Michael Duffy: And that suggests that Magritte may have been using commercial paint, in addition to more traditional tube oil paints. These details showed that Magritte had a sense of how the different kinds of paint would behave. So certain paints would dry in a glossy way, and other paints would dry more matte. And it appears as though he combined these different kinds of paint to get these unique effects.