Vincent van Gogh valuation
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.
What a work by Vincent van Gogh is worth
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 is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
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 The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is the authority, and the de la Faille catalogue is the historical reference.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.
At a glance
- Born
- 30 March 1853, Zundert
- Died
- 29 July 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise
- Movements
- Post-Impressionism, Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
Prints by van Gogh, and prints after him
Van Gogh made very few prints himself: nine lithographs in The Hague and Nuenen between 1882 and 1885, and a single etching, the portrait of Dr Gachet, at Auvers in 1890. Each survives in a handful of impressions, and nearly all of them are in museums. A sheet described as a van Gogh lithograph or etching is therefore almost always something else, and the useful question is what.
Usually it is reproductive. Early twentieth-century facsimiles, collotypes and photogravures were made to a high standard and have aged convincingly; later colour reproductions on board or canvas, sometimes with brushwork added by hand to imitate paint, are more common still. Under a magnifying glass most of them show the regular dot pattern of mechanical printing. These pictures have a market of their own as decorative objects, and identifying which kind you have is the first step. For anything that might be more, the Van Gogh Museum's researchers are the authority, and the great majority of works they examine turn out not to be by him.
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.
