Experts confirm $15 garage sale painting could be a Van Gogh
A painting sold for less than $50 at a garage sale in 2016, but now experts have discovered that it could be an original Vincent Van Gogh painting worth close to $15 million.
An antique collector found the painting at a garage sale in Minnesota in 2016. Since then, historians, scientists, and curators have researched whether it could be a genuine oil painting by the infamous Dutch artist. The painting has many of his creative trademarks, showing a fisherman smoking a pipe on an empty beach while fixing a net.
Experts have now named the painting ‘Elimar’ because it is written on the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. A 450-page report was created by the New York art research firm, LMI Group International, stating, “An exhaustive, multi-year investigation of the painting by experts in several fields has yielded the evidence required to identify Elimar as an autograph work by the artist”.
The report’s findings will be shared with Van Gogh specialists and global art dealers later this month. LMI Group claims that the painting was completed while the artist was in the Saint Paul asylum in France’s Saint-Remy du Provence between May 1889 and May 1890.
The report stated, “Elimar is clearly based upon a painting by the Danish artist Michael Ancher. Van Gogh did not copy but ‘translated’ Ancher’s work.” They have also stated that the painting represents a time in Van Gogh’s life when he was “returning to themes and images from his youth”.
“Portraits of fisherman and themes of the life at sea were some of his earliest subjects,” the report noted. The fisherman was “a persona and subject matter that was very close to him for the lonely and dangerous lives that fishermen led— in his lifetime.”
While there is much evidence that it was created by Van Gogh, it cannot be officially confirmed as an original until it has been examined by a Van Gogh Museum scholar in Amsterdam.
