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Newly discovered Van Gogh painting kept in attic for years Newly discovered Van Gogh painting kept in Norwegian attic for years
(about 4 hours later)
The Van Gogh Museum says it has identified a long-lost Vincent van Gogh painting that spent years in a Norwegian attic amd was believed to be by another painter. It is the first full-size canvas by the Dutch master discovered since 1928.
Sunset at Montmajour depicts trees, bushes and sky, painted with Van Gogh's familiar thick brush strokes. It can be dated to the exact day it was painted because the artist described it in a letter to his brother, Theo, and said he painted it the previous day – 4 July, 1888. A stunning landscape that has spent much of its life unloved in a Norwegian attic has been revealed as a newly discovered masterpiece by Vincent Van Gogh.
He said the painting was done "on a stony heath where small twisted oaks grow". Academics are nothing short of astonished, not least because it comes from the artist's greatest period when he lived in Arles, southern France, and created works such as The Yellow House and The Sunflowers.
Museum experts said the painting was authenticated by letters, style and the physical materials used, and they had traced its history. Writing in the Burlington Magazine, the three Dutch experts from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam responsible for the discovery call the work "absolutely sensational".
The museum's director, Axel Rueger, described the discovery as a "once-in-a-lifetime experience" at an unveiling ceremony. Sunset at Montmajour was unveiled at a ceremony in the Dutch city. Axel Rüger, director of the museum, called it a "once in a lifetime experience".
The museum said the painting belonged to an unidentified private collector and would be on display at the museum from 24 September. The picture was painted in 1888 and shows the wild and beautiful countryside near Arles with a ruined abbey on the hill of Montmajour.
It did not disclose full details of how the painting had been recovered, but said that it had been owned by a Norwegian man who had been told it was not by Van Gogh, so he put it in the attic. The painting, new research suggests, was bought by a Norwegian industrialist, Christian Nicolai Mustad, in 1908 on the advice of art historian and conservator Jens Thiis, who that year became director of the National Museum in Oslo.
Rueger said the museum had itself rejected the painting's authenticity in the 1990s, in part because it was not signed. But new research techniques and a two-year investigation had convinced them. All was fine but a family story suggests that the French ambassador to Sweden visited Mustad and suggested it was either a fake or wrongly attributed. Furious, the industrialist banished it to the attic.
Researcher Teio Meedendorp said he and other researchers "have found answers to all the key questions, which is remarkable for a painting that has been lost for more than 100 years". "The art world was jittery at the time, possibly because of a rise in the number of forgeries in circulation, and as a result owners felt uncertain," the three Dutch experts, Louis van Tilborg, Teio Meedendorp and Oda van Maanen, write in the Burlington.
The painting was listed among Theo van Gogh's collection as number 180, and that number can still be seen on the back of the canvas. The work was sold in 1901. What is not likely is that it was the ambassador. More likely it was the Norwegian consul in Paris, Auguste Pellerin, a collector who would have been considered an authority. Bizarrely, he was also the owner of Astra Margarine, the direct competitor with Mustad in Norway.
Vincent van Gogh struggled with bouts of mental distress throughout his life, and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1890. He sold only one painting while he was alive, though his work was just beginning to win acclaim. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which houses 140 of the Dutch master's works, receives more than a million visitors annually, and Van Gogh paintings are among the most valuable in the world. Putting all this together, that Mustad was a young fledgling collector, that Pellerin was both a greater authority and a business rival, then it is possible to see how upset Mustad might be. Better to get it off the wall and quickly move on to better acquisitions.
Rueger described Sunset as ambitious, because the canvas is relatively large, at 93.3cm x 73.3cm (36.7in x 28.9in). Mustad died in 1970 and the painting has twice been rejected as a Van Gogh – including once in 1991 by the Van Gogh Museum.
"In this case, size does matter," he said. All the evidence now suggests the art experts were wrong and the museum has even found reference to the painting by the artist.
Van Gogh referred to the work in two other letters in the same summer it was painted, but he said he considered it a failure in several respects. The magazine article quotes a moving description of a newly discovered landscape that an excited Van Gogh described in a letter to his brother Theo. He talked of the amazing sunlight – "absolutely a shower of gold" – and the beautiful lines. He wrote: "You wouldn't have been at all surprised to see knights and ladies suddenly appear, returning from hunting with hawks, or to hear the voice of an old provençal troubadour. The fields seem purple, the distances blue."
The location it depicts can be identified: it shows the ruins of an abbey near Montmajour hill near Arles, France, where Van Gogh was living at the time. The ruins can be seen in the background of the work, on the left-hand side. In the letter Van Gogh talks of a study that he made which has always been associated with a painting that hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Rocks. The new research says that association is wrong, but the references do make sense when linked to Sunset at Montmajour.
Meedendorp said it belongs "to a special group of experimental works that Van Gogh at times esteemed of lesser value than we tend to nowadays". There is ample evidence of it being his hand, says the article, not least "the diversity of the brushstrokes and the creaminess of the paint, as well as in the rapidity and liveliness with which it was applied".
The newly attributed painting is in the hands of a no doubt thrilled, but anonymous, owner but will be on display in Amsterdam from 24 September.