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A painting that sold for less than $50 at a garage sale could be an original Van Gogh worth $15 million, experts say.
The canvas was found by an unsuspecting antiques collector at a Minnesota garage sale in 2016 and now historians, scientists and curators have teamed up to prove that it is an oil painting by the famed Dutch artist, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The painting bears a resemblance to Van Gogh’s work and depicts a fisherman smoking a pipe as he tends to his net on an empty beach.
Experts have called the painting “Elimar” because the name is etched into the lower right-hand corner of the canvas.
“An exhaustive, multi-year investigation of the painting by experts in several fields has yielded the evidence required to identify Elimar as an autograph work by the artist,” New York art-research firm LMI Group International, which acquired the painting from the antiques collector, declared in its 450-page report.
The group’s findings will be shared with Van Gogh specialists and art dealers around the world later this month, according to the Journal.
They argue that the portrait was painted while Van Gogh was in the Saint-Paul asylum in France’s Saint-Remy de Provence between May 1889 and May 1890.
“Elimar is clearly based upon a painting by the Danish artist Michael Ancher,” the report said. “Van Gogh did not copy but ‘translated’ Ancher’s work.”
Experts said that the portrait also represents a time in the artist’s life when he was “returning to themes and images from his youth.”
“Portraits of fisherman and themes of the life at sea were some of his earliest subjects,” the report noted. The fisherman was “a persona and subject matter that was very close to him for the lonely and dangerous lives that fishermen led— in his lifetime.”
Evidence was meticulously gathered and thousands of dollars were reportedly spent on carrying out the work. Brushstrokes were examined and compared to other works, while the painting’s pigments and fibers were also studied by a fine art expert.
Maxwell Anderson, former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, told the Journal that he was “struck by what he saw” when the painting was first unveiled to him.
“Was I all in? No,” Anderson told the outlet. “But I was super intrigued.”
However, the painting cannot be validated officially as a Van Gogh original without the final word from a Van Gogh Museum scholar in Amsterdam, art authenticator Richard Polsky told the Journal.
“People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be wonderful if they found a Van Gogh,” Polsky, who was not involved in the project, said. “But they’ve got to pin everything down and get a scholar at the Van Gogh Museum to sign off on it.”
The Museum did not comment on Elimar but told the newspaper that it had a “rigorous procedure” in place to separate the fakes from legitimate pieces.
The spokesperson added that “99 percent” of authentication requests the museum received over the last few years “could not be attributed to Van Gogh in our opinion.”
