Someone may have just scored the yard-sale find of a lifetime.
A painting bought at a Minnesota garage sale was just identified as an unknown work from Vincent van Gogh, according to analysis from art-research firm LMI Group International, CNN reported. The famed artist created the rare artwork, which was acquired by an antiques collector in 2016, while he was in the Saint-Paul sanitarium in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889, experts from the company said.
Entitled Elimar (which can be found in the bottom-right corner of the piece) the oil-on-canvas painting depicts a fisherman with a pipe, working on repairing a net. The 18-inch-by-16.5-inch (45.7 centimeters by 41.9 centimeters) work is inspired by a painting from Danish artist Michael Ancher, in what is known as one of van Gogh’s many “translations" of paintings by other artists, according to the LMI Group.
It took the LMI Group four years to identify Elimar as a work of van Gogh; the company used a variety of techniques, including analyzing the canvas weave, pigments, and the composition of the work, CNN noted. The firm discovered this painting had the same egg-white temporary finish that van Gogh was known to use to protect his creations, for example. The LMI Group also did a mathematical comparison of the Elimar inscription to other signatures of the famed artist and found significant similarities, the company said.
OddCommon
LMI even tried to match DNA from a hair embedded in the canvas to those of van Gogh’s descendants, but it was unsuccessful due to the strand’s “degraded state," though the piece was confirmed to have belonged to a human male, CNN reported.
“LMI Group’s data-based approach to verifying authorship of this painting represents a new standard of confidence for bringing to light unknown or forgotten works by important artists," Lawrence M. Shindell, LMI Group’s chairman said in a statement. “By integrating science and technology with traditional tools of connoisseurship, historical context, formal analysis, and provenance research, we aim both to expand and tailor the resources available for art authentication based on the unique properties of the works under our care."
Now, though, the real test begins: Elimar needs to be attributed to van Gogh by his eponymous museum in Amsterdam. When the painting’s previous owner reached out to the Van Gogh Museum in December 2018, the institution refused to attribute the previously unknown piece to the artist, according to CNN. For LMI’s part, it’s prepared to back up its findings.
“In his lifetime, van Gogh lost many works by giving them away to friends or being neglectful," the group said in a press release. “It is believed that nearly 300 paintings may have been lost, many during van Gogh’s time at Saint-Rémy. The discovery of one of these lost works, Elimar, is the product of four years of research by LMI Group and a team of art historians, literary historians, provenance experts, materials scientists, and computational experts who forensically analyzed the portrait’s many facets."
Elimar wouldn’t be the first forgotten artwork to be found in unusual places. A painting found in an Italian villa’s basement may turn out to be a multimillion-dollar Picasso, while a rare William H. Dorsey watercolor was just uncovered in a thrift shop.
From the article by Nicole Hoey
