Yard sale painting bought for $50 is undiscovered Van Gogh masterpiece worth gigantic sum, experts say
A painting bought for less than $50 at a Minnesota yard sale is actually an undiscovered $15 million Van Gogh masterpiece, experts believe.
The piece features a fisherman smoking his pipe while mending his net on an deserted beach.
It was purchased by an unsuspecting antiques dealer who spotted it in a bin filled with paintings in 2019.
He was immediately struck by the similarities in brush strokes between those in the painting and the famous Dutch master's.
The unidentified buyer sold the work to LMI Group International, which has spent $300,000 and utilized around 30 experts in their quest to prove the painting's veracity.
LMI sent their lawyer Lawrence Shindel to verify the piece Maxwell Anderson, the former Met curator, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The experts were encouraged by what they found - including what appeared to be a possibly telltale reddish hair embedded in the paint.
Van Gogh was famed for his russet locks.
'Was I all in? No,' Anderson explained, 'but I was super intrigued.'
A painting bought for less than $50 at a Minnesota yard sale is actually a $15 million Van Gogh masterpiece , experts believe
Experts believe it was painted by Van Gogh while he was a patient at a psychiatric hospital in the south of France
Another clue was the signature 'Elimar' which was inscribed in the bottom of the painting.
While not Van Gogh's own name, the moniker was used in another verified Van Gogh painting and experts from digital agency Odd Common noted the similarity between the script in both signatures.
It is widely accepted among scholars that the Dutch artist frequently did not sign his own name, so the lack of signature is not an issue.
Anderson and Shindel began to posit that the piece could form part of a body of work painted by Van Gogh while he was convalescing at a psychiatric hospital in the south of France.
The collection of 150 paintings took inspiration from other artist's works and were described as 'translations' by Van Gogh in letters to his brother Theo.
Anderson and Shindel noted that a similar artwork by Danish painter Michael Ancher’s 1870s-1880s 'Portrait of Niels Gaihede' also features a fisherman in a similar pose.
They believe Van Gogh may have copied the works of other artists in his own style during this era, which may explain why the color palette on the unearthed work is duller than his usual hues.
Anderson and Shindel had a way to go before convincing Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, which says it receives around 40 potentially credible submissions every year.
The experts enlisted the help of Jennifer Mass, president of Scientific Analysis of Fine Art who studied the pigment and composition of the canvas to try and date the piece.
They noted that this signature appears on another verified Van Gogh painting
Around 30 experts and $300,000 has been spent by the painting's new owners to try and prove its provenance
She determined that the canvas' thread count tallied with those produced in Van Gogh's day.
However, one of the colors used could not be dated to the Van Gogh's lifetime until Mass sought help from Ben Appleton, a patent lawyer with Wilson Gunn.
Appleton sifted through reams of handwritten French patents until he managed to locate one from 1883 which corresponded to the color and which challenged the assumption that the paint was not made until the 1900s.
The patent was filed by the Colored Materials and Chemical Products of Saint-Denis, a suburb in Paris. Van Gogh's paints were provided by his Parisian brother.
The discovery has also helped experts more accurately date other artworks which use the same paint.
The findings of the study will be unveiled at a private event for Van Gogh experts later this month.
The only way to obtain verification is to get a scholar at the Van Gogh museum to sign off on it.
Van Gogh was born in the Dutch city of Zundert in 1853 and shot himself dead in 1890 aged just 37.
The artist struggled with mental health issues throughout his life and famously severed his left ear with a razor following an argument with famed French painter Paul Gaugin.
He had only begun to experience success in the final year of his life, with his tragic suicide subsequently turbocharging interest in his works.
They include the seminal Sunflowers paintings and The Starry Night.
The experts sought help from a historian who analyzed the thread count of the canvas and the kind of paint use to date it to Van Gogh's lifetime
The discovery of the suspected new Van Gogh is not the first time a high end artwork has been picked up from humble circumstances.
A Washington DC woman managed to find a 2,000-year-old Mayan vase at a thrift store.
While Texan woman Laura Young picked up a priceless Roman bust for just $35 at her local Goodwill.
