It's the things dreams are made of: you pick up an innocuous painting at a car boot sale only to discover that it might be a previously unknown piece by one of the most influential figures in art worth millions. This time round though the dream is a reality because experts believe they've just verified a long-lost Van Gogh masterpiece. So, how does the evidence stack up, asks Rosie Paterson?
A painting picked up for less than $50 at a car boot sale, could be an original Vincent Van Gogh, worth $15million, according to experts.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the canvas —which depicts a soured-looking fisherman smoking a pipe and mending a net in front of a sandy beach — was bought by an antiques collector in Minnesota, back in 2016. It has since been acquired by New York art-research firm LMI Group International who laid out their evidence for the startling claim inside a 450-page report.
After ‘an exhaustive, multi-year investigation’, LMI are proposing that the 18-inch-by-16.5-inch work titled Elimar — the word scrawled in the bottom-right corner — was painted by Van Gogh while he was in the Saint-Paul sanitarium in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, between 1889 and 1890.
They’ve gone to exhaustive lengths to prove that the Dutch master is in fact the artist, including trying to match DNA from a hair embedded in the paint to one of his descendants. Unfortunately, the attempt was unsuccessful, but more convincing is the comparison of the Elimar inscription to other signed Van Gogh works which found significant similarities and the discovery that the work had been covered in a protective egg-white finish, a known Van Gogh technique. There has also been considerable analysis of the canvas weave, pigments and composition.
‘Self Portrait’ by Michael Ancher, oil on canvas, 1902.
Elimar bears a few striking similarities to works by Danish artist Michael Peter Ancher (1849-1927) — widely known for his paintings of fishermen — including, compositionally, his self-portrait of 1902. According to LMI, this only adds more weight to their findings: experts agree that Van Gogh ‘translated’, rather than copied, a not insubstantial number of other artist’s works between 1887 and early 1890. The majority of these appropriation artworks were inspired by Jean-François Millet; speaking specifically of the works after Millet, Van Gogh said: ‘It’s not copying pure and simple that one would be doing. It is rather translating into another language, the one of colours, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black.’
‘Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat’ by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas, 1890
Millet was at the forefront of art’s ‘peasant genre’ which started to gain traction in the mid-19th century and greatly influenced Van Gogh. In it, hard-working labourers, normally relegated, anonymously, to the background of larger, normally picturesque, landscapes were brought to the fore of the canvas, lending them a sense of realness. They were made human again. Van Gogh’s own works that fall into this category include Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat (1890) and Head of a Young Peasant in a Peaker Cap (1885).
The post-impressionist painter also had precedence for painting specifically fisherman (Fisherman on the Beach, 1882) and art historians have pondered over whether he felt a certain kinship to them, in particular with their job-enforced isolation and loneliness. Van Gogh took his own life in a field, in July 1890, having suffered for years with severe mental illness and his own perceived failure. And though it’s hard to compile a definitive list of the most expensive paintings ever made because so many, especially Old Masters, are held by various museums around the world, unlikely to ever come up for sale and thus considered priceless, Van Gogh regularly appears in attempts to do so, alongside da Vinci, de Kooning, Cézanne, Klimt, Rembrandt and Rothko.
So, what happens next? Who gets the final word? That would be the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam who have a ‘rigorous procedure’ in place for dealing with claims like this one — and precedence might not be on LMI’s side. In 2018, when the previous owner reached out to the Museum, they refused to attribute the previously unknown piece to Van Gogh — along with 99% of other authentication requests.
Visit the LMI Group website to read the whole report.
