Vincent van Gogh
Painted for ten years, sold almost nothing, and changed what a picture could be made to do.
Vincent van Gogh was born at Zundert in the Netherlands in 1853 and came to painting at twenty-seven, after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher in a Belgian mining district. The whole body of work belongs to the ten years that followed: the dark Dutch peasant pictures, then Paris, where Impressionism and Japanese prints lifted the palette entirely, then Arles, Saint-Remy and Auvers-sur-Oise, where the paint went on in ropes and the colour became structural rather than descriptive. He sold almost nothing in his lifetime and was supported throughout by his brother Theo. He died in 1890, at thirty-seven.
Essentially everything is in institutions and the catalogues are closed, so an unrecorded work appearing is an extraordinary event rather than an opportunity, and the correct first assumption on anything offered as a van Gogh is that it is not one. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is the authority, and the de la Faille catalogue is the historical reference. What does circulate widely is reproductive material — later prints, photogravures and copies, some of them old enough to look convincing — and separating those from anything else is the entire practical exercise.
If you own a work by Vincent van Gogh
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.