#lost painting

[blueiscoool]

Painting Found at Garage Sale is a Van Gogh

During Vincent van Gogh’s year-long stay in a French asylum, he created some 150 paintings—including Irises and The Starry Night. He also painted many interpretations of other artists’ work, calling them “translations.” As van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, he was “not copying pure and simple” but rather “translating into another language, the one of colors, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black.”

Now, experts say they’ve identified a long-lost van Gogh translation: an oil portrait of a red-cheeked fisherman, which an antiques collector purchased at a garage sale in Minnesota for under $50.

The collector sold the piece to the art research firm LMI Group International for an undisclosed amount in 2019. Since then, the company’s researchers have been investigating the painting, and they recently released a 450-page report detailing their conclusion: It’s a van Gogh.

When art historian Maxwell L. Anderson, chief operating officer of LMI Group, first laid eyes on the painting, he was “struck by what [he] saw,” as he tells the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow. “Was I all in? No,” he adds. “But I was super intrigued.”

At the garage sale, the collector had been intrigued by the painting’s impasto, a technique involving thickly laid paint. The 18-inch-tall portrait depicts a white-bearded man by the sea who is smoking a pipe and repairing a fishing net. His downcast eyes betray contemplation, and his face is marked by ruddy coloring and deep smile lines. In the work’s bottom right corner is a signature: the word “Elimar.”

Though the piece lacked van Gogh’s famously vivid colors, Anderson saw “telltale signs of a deft painter at play,” per the Wall Street Journal. He also noticed a hair embedded in the brushwork.

In its analysis of Elimar, LMI Group combined science and technology with “traditional tools of connoisseurship, historical context, formal analysis and provenance research,” as chairman, president and CEO Lawrence M. Shindell says in a statement.

The company hired Jennifer Mass, president of Scientific Analysis of Fine Art, to analyze the canvas’ fibers and pigments. One particular red—geranium lake, or PR-50—introduced doubts. Van Gogh died by suicide in 1890, and researchers have always thought geranium lake was first patented around 1905.

Mass brought in patent lawyer Ben Appleton to search for an earlier patent. After a month of research, his firm found an 1883 patent for PR-50—a “find-within-a-find for conservators, who can now date and authenticate works containing 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 to someone with red or red-brown hair. As van Gogh’s 35 self-portraits illustrate, the artist had ginger locks. Additionally, researchers found that the letters in the painting’s “Elimar” inscription—particularly the Es, Ms and As—match those in an 1885 van Gogh painting.

Van Gogh regularly neglected to sign his paintings, but why mark this one “Elimar”? According to LMI Group, Elimar is the name of a character in the 1848 Danish novel The Two Baronesses by Hans Christian Andersen—one of van Gogh’s favorite authors.

According to the report, van Gogh painted Elimar in 1889, during his first year at the sanitarium in southern France. Experts think Elimar is a so-called translation of Danish artist Michael Ancher’s portrait of fisherman Niels Gaihede, “a subject to which both [painter Paul] Gauguin and van Gogh were drawn,” per the statement.

“As soon as we saw the Ancher, I knew we were right,” art historian and LMI Group researcher William Havlicek tells the Wall Street Journal.

Experts think Elimar was inspired by Michael Ancher’s portrait of fisherman Niels Gaihede

The analysis has provided “fresh insight into the oeuvre of van Gogh, particularly as it relates to his practice of reinterpreting works by other artists,” Anderson says in the statement. He thinks Elimar is “a form of spiritual self-portrait, allowing viewers to see the painter as he wished to be remembered.”

LMI Group will soon begin showing Elimar to major van Gogh scholars and dealers. They think the artwork is worth at least $15 million. Still, the painting’s authorship is not yet widely accepted, and art experts are generally hesitant to draw conclusions about newly discovered works’ authenticity.

“People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be wonderful if they found a van Gogh,” Richard Polsky, an art authenticator who wasn’t involved in the project, tells the Wall Street Journal. “But they’ve got to pin everything down and get a scholar at the Van Gogh Museum [in Amsterdam] to sign off on 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 wasn’t the real deal. However, the museum hasn’t yet responded to the new report.

“At the end of the day, the most important thing is what the experts in Van Gogh think of the artwork,” Robert Snell, co-owner and fine arts specialist at Revere Auctions in St. Paul, tells KARE’s Kent Erdahl.

Snell is particularly interested in the painting’s provenance. “Trying to figure out how that piece ended up at a garage sale in Minneapolis is really the $15 million mystery,” he adds.

By Sonja Anderson.

[mary-maud]

Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence, Caravaggio, 1609.

[kinkander]

Cesare da Sesto - Leda and the Swan (details)

[oktaviaslabyrinth]

Lost Painting // Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania (2023)

[thepastisalreadywritten]

—

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – 17 May 1510), better known as Sandro Botticelli or simply Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance.

[littleevil0ne1]

✨️Joana Indi and the Queen of Egypt ✨️

[corrodedparadox]

System

[porrigens]

some unfinished pegoryus

[itsmeglycine]

[b1ttersweet-dreams]

lost wisdom by the edge of the stream at dusk

[alicenpai]

princess tutu: die jahreszeiten 🌸

kind of a companion piece to my 2022 ptutu drawing | it's on inprnt

this print was at anime north; next con is otakuthon!

oops so my hand slipped and i made another princess tutu drawing. i admittedly don't watch that much anime so my catalogue of work is gonna be the same 5 animes LMAO. what can i say, i love "dark" fairy tales, and i've been really enjoying the more fine art approach to a lot of my drawings as of late (and the watercolour brush i've been using has been so perfect for that...!)

as my first princess tutu drawing is now 2 years old, there are some areas i've grown to have ... qualms with... although both drawings as a whole are pretty much exactly what i envisioned, and that's always satisfying!

both of these were drawn in roughly a week's time (yes really...) for con crunch period (and i went back to this drawing after the con to touch up some areas that were a bit rough!). i wanted a different approach to this new pt drawing, with the focus on the line work, rather than on colours and lighting in the 2022 drawing.

this drawing had 2 goals: to continue the style i adopted in my witch hat atelier "lantern bearers" drawing (which i promise i'll post in full soon as soon as all of the zine artists get their go-ahead to post their pieces!), and to emulate the art nouveau movement's heavy emphasis on line work, albeit not a 1:1 style replication of course.

the seasons also aren't a 1:1 representation, as i didn't necessarily pick flowers or colours that are most strongly associated with the season (e.g. summer being a dark tone is a bold choice?). but it's kinda whatever, as i said before i drew this in a week, there may be more appropriate flowers with better meanings. i couldn't spend too too much time drafting and researching.

FLOWER SYMBOLISM:

- spring: apple blossoms, tulips - the apple blossom is a quintessential spring flower, and thus symbolize the arrival of spring. spring is a season of change, which ahiru/princess tutu is a force of, instigating change in her friends and unravelling the story around her. the flowers below her are tulips, and there are many meanings to tulips depending on the colour, due to their ubiquitous nature. i narrowed on one, and intended for them to symbolize happiness. princess tutu's pose is one in which that is open, inviting, and warm - reflecting her nurturing nature in the series, and her willingness to help others achieve happiness.

- summer: deadly nightshade flower, yellow rose - i chose for rue/princess kraehe to symbolize a fiery summer's night instead of the typical dazzling heat of a summer's day, a rather bold and unusual choice. the warmth of sunshine didn't quite fit, as the character is quite dramatic and passionate, with her intentions often hidden in shadow. next, the deadly nightshade - atropa belladonna - has a lot of mythological associations, a lot to do with poisoning, as the flower is toxic. the flowers bloom at night (another reason why i picked a nighttime backdrop for "summer") and also outwardly match rue's dark design scheme, as the cherry on top. yellow roses, at the bottom of her frame, are the archetypal flower depicting jealousy (as with many yellow flowers are), and at one point in the story, rue only wished for her own happiness at the misfortune of others.

- autumn: douglas fir needles, orange calla lily - autumn is another season of change - although much more tumultuous, as this season is traditionally taken to prepare for a long winter ahead - fitting for fakir as the role of the storyteller. the douglas fir is not a flower of course, but is a tree - with many different parts of this tree offering many benefits in advance of the winter season. i wanted the versatile nature of the douglas fir to reflect on fakir's dependable personality. next up, the calla lily is a flower with a dual meaning - on one hand you have life, on the other you have death. a storyteller quite literally can grant both at the tip of their fingers.

- winter: birch tree, snowdrop - winter is a rather still and unchanging season, a lull in the passage of time. this symbolizes mytho's passive nature at the start of the series, especially with his doleful pose here, as if almost in hibernation. to contrast, mytho is perched on the branches of a birch tree, which means new beginnings and renewal - as mytho is one of the characters that undergo the most change throughout the series (i'd argue the most?), regaining pieces of his heart. under mytho's frame is the snowdrop flower - and if you've read my witch hat atelier: seasons piece symbolisms, one of the snowdrop's meanings is rebirth, with connotations to the bible, bringing hope, when all had forsaken eve. the snowdrop is one of the first flowers to bloom even when the snow has not yet fully melted, further echoing mytho as an analogy for rebirth.

[shootingstarrfish]

shoutout to that one post about barbatos casually adopting powerful beings i couldnt stop thinking about it

[jeeklaart]

Lost in the sauce 🐈‍⬛

( find me here )

[weirdlookindog]

John Martin (1789-1854) - Pandemonium, 1841

[transthatfag]

dramatic :/

[nigelgraz]

First time painting a portrait with oils so obv i chose Alucard to be my model <3