Science 1 - Connoisseurship 0
March 20 2012
Picture: Independent
A still life dismissed by experts as not being by Van Gogh has now been re-attributed thanks to an x-ray analysis of the picture beneath. Van Gogh re-used a canvas on which he had painted a scene of two wrestlers, and now, for the first time, the wrestlers have been found. From The Independent:
The wrestlers’ existence was known only from a reference in one of the Dutch master’s letters, written aged 33, just four years before his tragic death. On 22 January 1886, he wrote: “This week I painted a large thing with two nude torsos – two wrestlers.”
There is no other painting of wrestlers. It is this painting that now confirms the still life’s authenticity. They are both on the same canvas. Van Gogh painted the still life over his wrestlers which could not be seen until now.
The still life was acquired in 1974 by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Holland, which boasts one of the world’s largest Van Gogh collections. But the painting’s link to Van Gogh had been repeatedly dismissed over the years because it was thought to be “uncharacteristically exuberant”.
In 2003, it was finally “deattributed” on stylistic grounds and unceremoniously relegated to a back room out of public view, listed merely as “artist: anonymous”.
