Kid With Pine Cone Puts Hole in Masterpiece

René Magritte's floating rock just got a very real hole. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem says a child visiting with family punctured Magritte's 1959 painting "The Castle of the Pyrenees," using a pine cone he'd picked up in the museum's sculpture garden, reports the Times of Israel. A museum spokesperson tells CNN that the "minor, unintentional damage" was caused by a 5-year-old boy who was visiting the museum with his grandmother.

The Surrealist work—showing a castle-topped boulder hovering over rough seas—is now undergoing restoration, with the museum declining to say how long it will be off view. Sharon Tager, the museum's head of conservation, says the restoration team will treat the paint layers and repair the canvas, noting they routinely handle works in far worse condition, including some stored since the Holocaust.

The painting itself has an unusual backstory, the Art Newspaper reports. In the 1950s, New York lawyer Harry Torczyner asked Magritte—a friend, client, and fellow Belgian—to create something to hide an unsightly building visible from his office window, and this canvas was the result. Torczyner, who fled Belgium to escape the Nazis, donated the painting to the Israel Museum in 1985 to mark the 20th anniversary of its founding.