My grandfather left me ‘£2m Van Gogh’... and we’ve had to spend £4k trying to prove it!

IT was bought for a few hundred guilders in the small Dutch city of Breda at the onset of the Second World War.

Featuring a well-thumbed open bible and a clay pipe, and with a ‘Vincent’ signature in the bottom right corner, it could have been a shrewd investment by the local trader who made the purchase.

Nearly 80 years later, however, his Surrey-based granddaughter is embroiled in a long-running row over whether the still life she inherited is an early work by Vincent van Gogh.

His pieces from a similar period have recently sold for anywhere between £1.3million and £2.3million at auction.

Backed by some art critics, Catherina Head and her family staunchly believe that the canvas was painted in the mangle room at the parsonage in Nuenen of Theodorus van Gogh, Vincent’s father, where the artist lived between 1883 and 1885.

Mrs Head and her husband Malcolm, from Guildford, have spent at least £4,000 trying to authenticate the work, with analysis of the pigment in the oil paint dating it to this period.

But the couple are no nearer to convincing the Van Gogh Museum in

‘Stylistic differences’

Amsterdam, the leading authority on his work. It has dismissed the painting, citing ‘stylistic differences’ and disputing its provenance.

The debate centres on the period prior to the family acquiring it and focuses on the origins and contents of what are known as ‘The Breda crates’, a collection of what is said to be early work by van Gogh that had been abandoned by his mother in 1886.

The painting was among the items in this collection.

The museum, however, disputes that the collection is of van Gogh works and claims it is more likely that Mrs Head’s painting was by the relatively unknown female Dutch artist Willemina Vincent.

The work was purchased by Breda-born Mrs Head’s grandfather Lambertus Macheil Rombout. It was one of two paintings he bought from artist and art dealer Johannes De Graaf, who also sold a number to a local tax inspector who tried and failed on several occasions to authenticate the works.

French art critic Benoit Landais – who caused a storm when he claimed van Gogh’s The Man With The Pipe was an ‘appalling forgery’ – supports the notion that Mrs Head’s painting could be ‘a genuine Vincent’, based on the painting’s subject, use of colours, the technique and pigment analysis.

‘To me, the still life is a genuine Vincent painted around 1884 in Nuenen when Vincent had been back with his parents,’ he told the Daily Mail, adding: ‘He was 31, a full-time artist for four years.’

Age tests involving firing ion beams at the canvas – a process used to detect forgeries – has supported the suggestion that it was painted between 1883 and 1885.

Further studies in the London laboratory of private art investigator Dr Nicholas Eastaugh also confirmed that all the components on the still life were ‘available to, and were used by, Vincent van Gogh’.

Art restorer Robert Mitchell, who has conserved more than 60,000 oil paintings, carried out a series of studies on the painting and said further research, such as DNA testing or even the finding of a fingerprint, could yield the truth.

‘It could well be a genuine painting by Vincent Van Gogh but everyone in the art world will say no before they say yes,’ he said.

The Van Gogh Museum dismissed the research by Dr Eastaugh, saying that the pigments identified were common around 1900, meaning ‘anybody could have made it’.

A spokesman said: ‘The case of the Heads’ still life painting has been known to us since 1997 and we think to have made it quite clear to them, on several occasions, that their still life painting in our view cannot be attributed to Vincent van Gogh due to great stylistic differences. The story about the provenance of this work before 1939 is, as we have minutely pointed out to them, highly debatable, to say the least.

‘Given Mrs Willemina Vincent’s death in 1922 she also has to be taken into account.’