Someone bought this painting at a garage sale for $ 50. Experts say it is a lost from Gogh worth $ 15 million

During the day Vincent van GoghThe year-long stay in a French asylum, he created around 150 paintings inclusive Irize And The Star Night. He also painted many interpretations of the work of other artists and called them ‘translations’. As Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, he was “not pure and simple”, but rather “translated into a different language, that of colors, the impressions of Chiaroscuro and white and black.”

Now experts say that they have identified a long lost from Gogh translation: an oil portrait of a fisherman with a red cheek, who has purchased an antique collector from a garage sale in Minnesota for less than $ 50.

The collector sold the play in 2019 to the art research agency LMI Group International. report Details their conclusion: it’s one of Gogh.

When art historian Maxwell L. AndersonChief Operating Officer of LMI Group, first an eyes in the painting, he was hit by what [he] saw, “as he says Wall Street Journal‘s Kelly Crow. “Was all in it? No, “he adds. “But I was super intrigued.”

At the Garage Sale, the collector was intrigued by the painting impastoA technique with thick paint. The 18-inch long portrait shows a man with white gestures by the sea who smokes a pipe and repairs a fishing net. His down eyes betrayed contemplation, and his face is characterized by Ruddy Coloring and Deep Smile lines. There is a signature in the right corner of the work: the word ‘Elimar’.

Although the famous vibrant colors of Van Gogh was missing, Anderson saw ‘Telltale drawing of an agile painter in the game’, according to the Wall Street Journal. He also saw a hair embedded in the brush work.

In his analysis of ShootLMI Group combined science and technology with “Traditional tools of tie, historical context, formal analysis and origin research,” as chairman, president and CEO Lawrence M. Shindell says in a rack.

The company has hired Jennifer MassPresident of the scientific analysis of visual arts to analyze the canvas fibers and pigments. A certain Red-General-Lake, or PR-50-introduced doubts. Van Gogh died by suicide in 1890 and researchers always thought that Geranium Lake was first patented around 1905.

Mass -insert patent lawyer Ben Appleton To look for a previously patent. After a month of research, his company found a patent from 1883 for PR-50-one “find-in-a-find for curators, who can now date and verify from working with this red pigment to the late 19th century,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

A genetic analysis of the hair embedded in the painting revealed that it had belonged of someone with red or red -brown hair. Like Van Gogh’s 35 self -portraits Illustrate, the artist had ginger closed. In addition, researchers discovered that the letters in the “elimaire” inscription of the painting – in particular the ES, MS and AS – who meet in a Van Gogh painting from 1885.

Van Gogh regularly failed to sign his paintings, but why mark these “Elimar”? According to LMI Group, Elimar is the name of a character in the Danish novel from 1848 The two baronesses Through Hans Christian Andersen– one of Van Gogh’s favorite Authors.

According to the report, Van Gogh painted Shoot in 1889, during his first year on the sanatorium In South France. Experts think Shoot is a so -called translation of the Danish artist Michael Ancher‘s Portrait of Visser Niels Gaihede‘A topic for which both [painter Paul] Gauguin And Van Gogh were signed, “according to the statement.

“As soon as we saw the ancher, I knew we were right,” says art historian and LMI group researcher William Havlicek de Wall Street Journal.

The analysis has “provided new insight into Van Gogh’s oeuvre, especially because it relates to his practice of reinterpreting works by other artists,” says Anderson in the statement. He thinks Shoot is “a form of spiritual self -portrait, so that viewers can see the painter as he wanted to be remembered.”

LMI Group is starting to show soon Shoot To Grote Van Gogh scholars and dealers. They think the artwork is worth at least $ 15 million. Yet the authorship of the painting is not yet generally accepted and art experts generally hesitate to draw conclusions about the authenticity of newly discovered works.

“People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be great if they found one Van Gogh,” Richard PolskyAn artificial authenticator who was not involved in the project, says the Wall Street Journal. ‘But they have to pin everything and get a scholar at the Van Gogh Museum [in Amsterdam] To draw it. “

The Van Gogh Museum has seen the painting before. The anonymous buyer submitted it to the museum in 2019 and experts ruled that it was not the real deal. However, the museum has not yet responded to the new report.

“At the end of the day, the most important thing the experts in Van Gogh are thinking of the artwork,” says Robert Snell, co-owner and specialist in Fine Arts at Revere Auctions in St. Paul, says KareErdahl knows.

Snell is especially interested in the origin of the painting. “Trying to find out how that piece ended up in a garage sales in Minneapolis is really the mystery of $ 15 million,” he adds.