Missing Van Gogh

A newly authenticated Van Gogh has gone on display 35 years after a discredited art collector bought it in Paris, convinced it was painted by the famed Dutch master but never able to prove it. Le Blute-Fin Mill was painted in 1886, according to Louis Van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It was bought in 1975 by Dirk Hannema, who was known as a brilliant museum curator but a fool when buying for his own collection. When he died in 1984 he claimed to have seven Vermeer’s, several Van Gogh’s and a few Rembrandts. He was right only about this painting, which went on show yesterday in the Museum de Fundatie in the town of Zwolle.

Mr Van Tilborgh said it was painted in 1886 when the artist was living in Paris. He said its large human figures are unusual for a Van Gogh landscape but it has his typically bright colours. The canvas bore the stamp of an art store he was known to frequent, and used pigments that were common in other works. The painting ‘adds to his oeuvre’, the curator said. ‘You can link it to certain works of Van Gogh in that period, but not that many of them.’ It is the first Van Gogh to be authenticated since 1995 and the sixth to be added to the confirmed list of the artist’s paintings since the latest edition of the standard catalogue was published in 1970. Van Gogh painted about 900 works in his brief career. Afflicted by mental illness, he died of a self-inflicted wound in 1890 at age 37.

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