Van Gogh’s Sunset in Montmajour: never say never
A captivating and surprising story, as intriguing as a noir novel by Michel Bussi. The story of a rejected Van Gogh, then fortunately recognized thanks to the precious work of the experts
The story of this work begins in 1908, when an industrialist, the Norwegian Christian Nicolai Mustad, heir to a well-known dynasty that in 1832 created the largest fishing industry in the world, bought a painting as an original by Vincent van Gogh .
The purchase was recommended to him by the art historian Jens Thiis, who that year was elected director of the National Museum of Oslo, therefore with the support of an authoritative voice. The success of the unfortunate Dutch painter in those years was now spreading, and Christian Mustad was very satisfied with his purchase, so much so that he placed it in the place of honor of his home.
But the dream was shattered when the collector was told that the painting was not a Van Gogh original but someone else’s work. It is not known who was the bearer of this unfortunate truth: whether, as the family recounts, the French ambassador to Sweden visiting the Mustad home or rather, according to scholars, the Norwegian consul in Paris, Auguste Pellerin, one of the greatest collectors of Impressionists of the time, especially Monet and Cezanne.
Christian Nicolai Mustad did not take this revelation well, indeed, his disappointment was such that, having removed the painting from its place of honor, he confined it to his attic, where it remained until his death in 1970.
With the execution of the inheritance, the painting finally reappeared and was sold by the heirs to a private collector. Not convinced of the downgrade to anonymous, but rather certain of the original authorship, the new owner took it to the Van Gogh Museum in 1991 to have the painting authenticated, but the museum replied, with an official reason, that the painting was not an original Van Gogh mainly because it was not signed.
The sentence seemed without appeal. In retrospect, we can hypothesize that perhaps there were more elements that led to that verdict, among which there could have been the “transitional” character of the work within Van Gogh’s production, with a technique different from the other works painted immediately after.
It was a terrible response from the museum but luckily the owner did not get rid of the painting, or, worse still, did not destroy it, as some authentication committees require today following an opinion of falsehood.
Fortunately, as other authentication committees do, it did not happen that the Amsterdam museum indelibly marked the painting as a forgery.
So the owner took back the work and waited, persisting in his research, until 2011, when he recklessly brought the painting back to the Van Gogh Museum. And this time the museum, with great wisdom, decided to reconsider its opinion and agreed to examine the work again.
Not all archives and foundations have the humility and the courage to review their positions, but in this case the Dutch museum decided to conduct a thorough investigation to re-examine the authenticity of the painting, especially since, compared to 1991, it could now count on new and different technical analyses.
The investigation lasted two years, and the story that emerged was completely different. It was decided to use synergies and simultaneously explore the three pertinent research areas, namely scientific analysis of materials, archival research on provenance, and attributive sensitivity.
New analytical metodhs and technologies were instrumental along with the discovery of new letters from Vincent to his brother. And the results were arrived.
The first scientific analysis concerned paint materials, and showed that the artwork had been produced with the same pigments that the painter used at that time. One of these colors, cobalt blue, is decisive in the case of Van Gogh, since he began to use it only in the summer of 1887, thus delimiting a probable period of time of realization, which coincided with Van Gogh’s frequentation of Arles and the its surroundings. This first discovery was really promising, but not enough to prove the authenticity of the painting, since there are fakes that use the same pigments, which is still commercially available.
Then the research deepened, and a second examination was conducted on the weft of the canvas, compared with an existing database of the wefts and warps of the known canvases used by the artist. The result was that the texture of the analyzed canvas was found to be compatible with one used at least for another Van Gogh painting of the same period. And not only the canvas, but also the preparation applied to the canvas itself turned out to be of the same type in both paintings. Another compatibility result, but not a true guarantee of authenticity.
At the same time, a more historical-artistic way, examining the mysterious number 180 scribbled on the back of the canvas, which incredibly no one had ever considered before. This number actually corresponds to a number in the famous inventory list that Theo van Gogh had compiled of his brother’s works after his death, also noting the title after the number. The painting no. 180 of the list in fact up to that moment had not found a correspondence with a work, so much so that scholars thought it was missing. Here is finally an important clue! The number at that point also allowed scholars to reconstruct the entire chain of provenance of the painting, until then fragmentary but a crucial element in an attribution: the painting had therefore been in the collection of his brother Theo who, however, died in 1901, six months just after Vincent’s death. It was his widow who sold it to the Parisian art dealer Maurice Fabre, from whom the Norwegian industrialist Christian Nicolai Mustad probably bought it in 1908, from whom the whole story began.
Finally, the historical-artistic research has also closed the circle thanks to the very important discovery of a new group of letters from Vincent to his brother, and among these a dated 4th July 1888, in which the artist describes the exact scene of the painting in question: “Yesterday, at sunset, I was on a stony moor, where very small and twisted oaks grow, in the background a ruin on the hill, and cornfields in the valley. It was romantic, it couldn’t be more, à la Monticelli, the sun poured its very yellow rays on the bushes and on the ground, absolutely a shower of gold. And all the lines were beautiful; the whole scene had a fascinating nobility ”.
This beautiful letter allowed scholars to finally confirm the subject, date and place of the painting: “Sunset in Montmajour“, painted on July 3, 1888, the day before the letter. The scene depicted was the moment of twilight in the cornfield landscape of Montamajour in Provence, with the homonymous Benedictine abbey in the distance. It seems that Van Gogh was particularly fascinated by the landscape of Montmajour, with its contrasts between the plateau below and the rocky outcrop, so much so that there are numerous paintings of him with the ruins of the monastery, the olive groves, the rocks that emerge from the hill. This was an ambitious work as evidenced by the large measures (93.3 x 73.3 cm), one of the first painted after his move to Arles, in which he placed great expectations. In fact, with this work he wanted to present himself as a poet among landscape painters and was deeply disappointed to find that, as he himself recognized, he had not been able to overcome certain “obstacles” in a convincing way. So soon the painter put it aside, coming to consider it “a failure”. It is certainly an experimental work by the artist, where he can be seen fighting with haste, which however represents a key work in his path, which just after this began to grow. In fact, it was during his stay in Arles, where he moved on February 20, 1888, that Van Gogh abandoned the impressionist techniques used in Paris to experiment with a free use of color as he himself wrote in April of the same year to his painter friend Bernard :
“I don’t follow any brushing system: I hit the canvas with irregular strokes that I leave as they are. Mixes, pieces of canvas left here and there, totally unfinished corners, second thoughts, brutality: in short, the result is, I am led to believe, rather disturbing and irritating, so as not to make people happy with preconceived ideas in terms of technique [… ] everything that will be ground will participate in a single purplish tone, the whole sky will have a blue hue, the greens will be either blue-green or yellow-green, purposely exaggerating, in this case, the yellow or blue qualities ”.
With all the new evidence gathered, in 2013 the Van Gogh Museum decided to publicly overturn its 1991 attribution, thus undoubtedly attributing the canvas to the great Dutch artist. It was Van Gogh’s first work discovered “from scratch” since 1928 and the museum director, Axel Rüger, described it as “a once in a lifetime experience. The painting had never before been seen in public, nor retouched by professionals. The final paint was missing and it hadn’t even been framed. It’s just a pure thing. It is already a rarity the very fact of being able to add a new piece to the artist’s work but what makes the discovery even more exceptional is that we are faced with a transitional work, a large painting, of the period in which the artist was at the peak of his career. An event of this magnitude had never occurred in the history of the Van Gogh Museum “.
Therefore, on the basis of the fascinating story of this opera, we can definitely say that in life it is sometimes worth a second look!
