Museum Identifies New Van Gogh Painting
By NINA SIEGAL
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam said “Sunset at Montmajour” was painted
in 1888, a period that is considered to be the height of Vincent Van
Gogh’s career.
Peter Dejong/Associated Press
Axel Rüger, left, director of
the Van Gogh Museum, and Louis van Tilborgh, a senior researcher,
unveiled "Sunset at Montmajour" on Monday.
By NINA SIEGAL
Published: September 9, 2013
AMSTERDAM — The Van Gogh Museum here announced today that it has
identified a major new painting by Vincent Van Gogh. The work, entitled
“Sunset at Montmajour,” was painted in Arles in 1888, a period that is
considered to be the height of the painter’s career.
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“For the first time in the history of the museum, that is in the past 40
years, a substantial capital new work of van Gogh has been discovered
that was completely unknown in the literature,” said the museum’s
director, Axel Rüger, in an interview. “We always think we’ve seen
everything and we know everything, and now we’re able to add a
significant new work to his oeuvre.” He added, “It is a work from the
most important period of his life, when he created his substantial
masterpieces, like ‘The Sunflowers,’ ‘The Yellow House’ and ‘The
Bedroom.'”
The painting depicts dusk in the hilly landscape of Montmajour, in
Provence, with wheat fields and the ruins of a Benedictine Abbey in the
background. The area around Montmajour was a subject that van Gogh
explored repeatedly during his time in Arles.
Fred Leeman, a former chief curator of the Van Gogh museum and now an
independent art historian and Van Gogh scholar based in Amsterdam, who
has curated many exhibitions about van Gogh and published scholarly
articles on his work, said he believed the work is “100 percent
genuine.”
He added, “There are, in hindsight, many pointers in his letters and
entries in catalogues of the 1900s that have been linked to other
paintings or misidentified.” Mr. Leeman said, “here, we see a painting
that fits those descriptions exactly. And what also contributes to the
proof is the advances in research that have been done with the pigments,
and the new evidence is completely in harmony with what we expect from
this painting.”
Mr. Leeman said the work also contributes to an alternative to our
understanding of the artist. “We have the impression of van Gogh as a
very modern painter, but here he’s working in the tradition of 19th
century landscape painting,” he said.
The painting has been in the private collection of a family for several
years and Mr. Rüger said that because of privacy concerns, he couldn’t
release any more information about the owners.
Until 1901, it was in the family collection once owned by Vincent’s
brother, Theo, said Marije Vellekoop, the head of collections, research
and presentation for the museum. His widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger
managed that collection, and sold it to a Paris art dealer. In 1908, the
art dealer sold it to a Norwegian collector, Ms. Vellekoop said.
Shortly after that, Ms. Vellekoop added, “it was declared a fake, or not
an original” and the Norwegian collector banished it to his attic,
where it stayed until the current owners purchased it from him. Ms.
Vellekoop declined to give any more information about the date of
purchase or the owners.
Two years ago, the current owner brought it to the Van Gogh Museum to
seek authentication, and researchers from the museum have been examining
it ever since, said Mr. Rüger. The museum recently concluded that the
work was a genuine van Gogh painting because the pigments correspond
with those of van Gogh’s palette from Arles.
Louis van Tilborgh, the Van Gogh Museum’s senior researcher, who worked
on the painting for the last two years, said that since 1991 the museum
has developed a number of new techniques for identifying and
authenticating works of art. He said that all those methods were put to
use when they had the chance to look at this painting again.
According to Mr. van Tilborgh, it was painted on the same type of
canvas, with the same type of underpainting van Gogh used for at least
one other painting, “The Rocks” (owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in
Houston) of the same area at the same time. The work was also listed as
part of Theo van Gogh’s collection in 1890, with the number “180” on the
back, which corresponds to the number in the collection inventory.
“We were able to reconstruct everything you can find out about it,” said
Mr. van Tilborgh. “We know what it depicts, we know the history, we
have a full quote in the letter about it. And the research and technical
investigation shows that it’s on a canvas that he painted a week after
the letter.”
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The date of the painting has been identified as July 4, 1888. A letter
van Gogh wrote the next day says, “Yesterday, at sunset, I was on a
stony heath where very small, twisted oaks grow, in the background a
ruin on the hill, and wheat fields in the valley. It was romantic, it
couldn’t be more so, à la Monticello, the sun was pouring its very
yellow rays over the bushes and the ground, absolutely a shower of gold.
And all the lines were beautiful; the whole scene had charming
nobility.”
“Sunset at Montmajour” is comparable in size to van Gogh’s “Sunflower”
painting of the same year. Museum officials declined to speculate on the
value of the work. “From this period, there are not so many paintings
on the market – either of this size and of this stature, so it’s hard to
say anything about that,” said Ms. Vellekoop. His “Sunflowers,” painted
in the same year, sold for £25 million ($39.9 million) in 1987 at an
auction at Christie’s London.
The owners brought it to the museum once before in 1991, said Mr. Rüger,
but at the time no one recognized it as a van Gogh. “This time, we have
topographical information plus a number of other factors that have
helped us to establish authenticity. Research is so much more advanced
now, so we could come to a very different conclusion.”
Van Gogh moved to Arles in February 1888 and spent time exploring the
landscapes in Provence, and doing work “en plein air,” or in nature. He
was particularly fascinated by the flat landscape around the hill of
Montmajour with its rocky outcroppings and hay-colored fields and made
several drawings of the ruins of the monastery, the olive trees and the
rocks jutting out of the hills. In a letter dated July 1888, he said
that he’d been to Montmajour at least 50 times “to see the view over the
plain.”
Describing the area to his friend, fellow artist Émile Bernard, he
wrote: “It’s an enormous stretch of flat country, a bird’s eye view of
it seen from the top of a hill – vineyards and fields of newly reaped
wheat. All this multiplied in endless repetition, stretching away
towards the horizon like the surface of a sea, bordered by the little
hills of the Crau.” Another known painting of the landscape is “Harvest
at La Crau – with Montmajour in the Background,” also of 1888.
The painting will be on view in Amsterdam starting on Sept. 24, as part
of the current exhibition, “Van Gogh at Work,” which focuses on other
new discoveries about the painter’s artistic development.
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