A forgotten Van Gogh is revealed
AMSTERDAM’s Van Gogh Museum has announced the discovery of a new work by Vincent van Gogh. The painting, Sunset at Montmajour (pictured), was painted in 1888 and mentioned in an 1890 inventory of the Dutch master’s paintings and in two letters to his brother. But it slipped from attention after failing to turn up during the 20th century and has never appeared in official catalogues of Van Gogh’s work.
“It’s extremely exciting, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said museum director Axel Ruger. “In the history of the museum, we haven’t had a discovery of this calibre.”
Experts at the museum have spent two years verifying the painting’s provenance after it was brought in for examination by its owners, a family with a private collection. They had brought it in before, in 1991.
Ruger said no one at the museum knew why it had not been considered for inclusion in Van Gogh’s oeuvre at that time. One hypothesis, he said, was that the location depicted in the painting was unfamiliar.
It shows a landscape near the village of Montmajour, on the outskirts of Arles, in Provence, that Van Gogh painted at other times, but from a different angle and includes the ruins of an abbey, which do not appear in his other works.
Experts were able to verify its authenticity this time using scientific analysis of the canvas and pigments, which matched those Van Gogh used in the late 1880s, when he was at the height of his creative powers. Other works from the same period include The Sunflowers and The Yellow House.
Ruger said the definitive identification relied on the fact that the number 180 appeared on the back of the canvas — the same number used in Theo van Gogh’s inventory.
The announcement marks an upbeat moment in a year of mixed news for Netherlands’s museums. Last month, the US director of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s leading modern art museum, said she would leave in December after a controversial three-year tenure. Ann Goldstein, formerly curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, was hired in 2010 to oversee a renovation intended to shake up an institution widely seen as stuffy and insular. But the new wing at the Stedelijk, which is next door to the Van Gogh Museum, was savagely criticised by architecture critics when it opened last year.
In July, authorities in Romania announced that seven works stolen from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal modern art museum last year, in one of the largest art heists in history, had almost certainly been destroyed by the thieves. However, one of the suspects in the theft has since claimed that five of the works still exist.
On a brighter note, the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh’s neighbour to the north, was widely praised for the quality of its decade-long renovation after it reopened in April.