The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam said on Friday that a long-lost portrait was, in fact, not by Vincent van Gogh, contradicting a 458-page report by the New York–based firm LMI Group International that claimed it was by the famed painter.
The painting in question, titled Elimar (1889), depicts a fisherman with a round hat on his head and a pipe in his mouth. The fisherman appears transfixed as he repairs his net near a shore. The word “Elimar,” presumed to be the man’s name, is scrawled in the lower righthand corner.
LMI Group said that the portrait would have been created while van Gogh was at the Saint-Paul psychiatric sanitarium in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. Van Gogh had checked himself into the sanitarium; he remained there from May 1889 and May 1890.
To assess the painting, LMI Group assembled a team of roughly 20 experts from a variety of fields, including chemists, curators, and patent lawyers. In 2019, the firm paid an undisclosed sum for the work, purchasing it from an anonymous antiques collector who found it at a Minnesota garage sale. The company put more than $30,000 into investigating the work.
In a statement, LMI Group said, “The authentication of van Gogh artworks is complicated and inherently rife with challenges due to the long history of fakes and forgeries permeating the market. Central to these difficulties are previously unattributed works created by the artist but never mentioned in his letters, as well as artworks mentioned but never found—potentially as many as 300.”
The firm went on to question the museum’s methods, saying it was “puzzled why the Van Gogh Museum invested less than one working day to summarily reject the facts presented […] without offering any explanation, let alone studying the painting directly rather than looking at it reproduced as a JPEG.”
The painting’s previous owner had allegedly also contacted the museum in 2018, but any further examination of the work was declined based on the image.
The Van Gogh Museum is known for its rigorous authentication process, which often results in the outright rejection of most attribution requests. The museum has considered up to 200 authentication requests per year, “99% of which could not be attributed to Van Gogh in our opinion,” a Van Gogh Museum spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal this week.
More recently, as requests increased to roughly 500 per year, the museum changed its process to only consider those that have had additional approval from galleries, auction houses, or art professionals, leaving around 40 candidates per year.
“We expected the Museum to delineate any specific facts in our extensive report with which its experts disagree and the reasons why, and to delineate facts that the Museum might have that it believes change the attribution and why with particularity. We have offered to connect the Museum with the scholars and scientists who contributed to the report to discuss their findings, and we have offered to bring the painting to Amsterdam for further study in person,” LMI Group said.
The Van Gogh Museum did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s for comment.
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