At a garage sale in Minnesota, an antiques collector bought a thick impasto oil painting of a fisherman for less than $50. Now, some experts believe, it may be a long-lost van Gogh.
The painting in question, titled Elimar (1889), would have been created while the artist was at the Saint-Paul psychiatric sanitarium in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, into which he checked himself, between May 1889 and May 1890. During that time, he painted some 150 canvases, including such masterpieces as Almond Blossom (1890), Irises (1889), and The Starry Night (1889).
Elimar depicts a fisherman with a white chin-beard and a round hat holding a pipe in his mouth transfixed as he repairs his net along a desolate shore. The word “Elimar”, presumed to be the man’s name, is scrawled in the lower righthand corner. It measures 18 by 16 inches.
To assess the painting, a team of roughly 20 experts from a variety of fields—including chemists, curators, and patent lawyers—were assembled by the New York-based art-research firm LMI Group International, which purchased the work from the anonymous antiques collector for an undisclosed sum in 2019.
A detailed 458-page report on the piece revealed some compelling details. In studying Elimar‘s pigments and fibers, for example, president of Scientific Analysis of Fine Art Jennifer Mass found that the canvas’ thread count matched those made during van Gogh’s time, as did the pigments used to paint the work—except one.
The organic compound PR-50, related to the popular geranium lake red pigment, which created violet hues in the sky of the portrait, is credited to a French patent from 1905-06. Ben Appleton, a patent lawyer with Wilson Gunn, was able to trace an 1883 patent for PR-50 registered by the Colored Materials and Chemical Products of Saint-Denis in a Paris suburb (Van Gogh’s brother Theo, who lived in Paris, supplied him with paint.). As a result, conservators can now date and authenticate works with this pigment to the late 19th, instead of the early 20th, century.
“The analysis conducted on this distinctive painting provides fresh insight into the oeuvre of van Gogh, particularly as it relates to his practice of reinterpreting works by other artists,” Maxwell L. Anderson, Chief Operating Officer of LMI Group and former Metropolitan Museum of Art director, said in a statement. “This moving likeness embodies van Gogh’s recurring theme of redemption, a concept frequently discussed in his letters and art. Through Elimar, van Gogh creates a form of spiritual self-portrait, allowing viewers to seethe painter as he wished to be remembered.”
The painting, however, will still have to be officially attributed by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. If it is, in fact, an authentic van Gogh, the piece will be worth an estimated $15 million.
