‘New’ Van Gogh drawing will go on display in museum

A drawing newly attributed to Vincent van Goghthat has never been displayed publicly before is going on show at the Amsterdam museum that bears the Dutch master’s name.

The“new”van Gogh,“study for‘worn Out,’”from November 1882, is part of a Dutch private collection and was known to only a handful of people, including a few from the Van Gogh Museum.

The owner, who will remain anonymous, asked the museum to determine whether the unsigned drawing is by Van Gogh.

From the style to the materials used — a thick carpenter’s pencil and coarse watercolor paper — it conforms to Van Gogh’s Hague drawings, Senior Researcher Teio Meedendorp said Thursday.

There are even traces of damage on the back linking it to the way Van Gogh used wads of starch to attach sheets of paper to drawing boards.

“It’s quite rare for a new work to be attributed to Van Gogh,” the museum’s director Emilie Gordenker said in a statement. “We’re proud to be able to share this early drawing and its story with our visitors.”

It comes from a time in the artist’s career when he was working to improve his skills as a painter of people and portraits by drawing them.

The museum already owns the almost identical drawing, “Worn Out.”

“It was quite clear that they are related,” Meedendorp said.

The study has been loaned to the museum and goes on show from Friday through Jan. 2.

It shows an elderly, balding man sitting, hunched forwards, on a wooden chair, his balding head in his hands.