A hidden 'van gogh' auctioned for a century

Will

disappear again

It all depends on who is behind the offer, at the moment anonymous, of 13,091,250 million euros that brought down the hammer this Thursday at the Sotheby's auction house.

It was the sale in Paris of one of the most curious works of Vincent van Gogh,

.

It is an almost unknown painting by one of the most recognized painters in the world, which emerged a month ago after spending more than a century in the hands of the same family, who never exhibited it to the public.

The painting, which represents one of the famous mills that dotted the bohemian quarter of Montmartre at the end of the 19th century, is also a key painting in the transition towards the so characteristic style that would make the Dutch artist famous (posthumous).

The price of the almost unpublished painting - there was only a small photo of the oil in the Van Gogh museum - was estimated at between five and eight million euros and came out for four, a figure quickly exceeded.

Lot number six - which was the

was originally awarded for a price of € 14 million under the hammer (more than € 16 after tax) by an anonymous online buyer.

However, the auction was reopened, by surprise, at the end of the bidding of the last of the 33 planned lots and finally reached the slightly lower final price of 13.1 million euros.

A high figure but far from the initial one and, above all, from those reached by other later works - from his best known and most admired period - by the painter.

As

recalled

, in March 1987, Christie's sold the painting

for $ 39.9 million

and, eight months later, Sotheby's managed to raise bids to $ 53.9 million for

.

The absolute record of $ 82.5 million was reached in 1990 by the

, made in 1890, in the last months of Van Gogh's life, and which has been missing since its last known owner, the Japanese millionaire Ryoei Saito. , passed away in 1996.

However,

had aroused a curiosity like few other works by such an omnipresent artist.

The key is precisely that, that it was an almost unpublished work by a painter about whom so much has been written and seen.

The curators Claudia Mercier and Fabien Mirabaud, of the Mercier-Mirabaud house, which joined Sotheby's for this occasion, stated a month ago, when announcing the unusual auction: “Preserved for a century in the bosom of a French family, this painting, never exhibited before, constitutes a real find ”.

After learning of its existence, specialists took it to Amsterdam for authentication, Mirabaud explained hours before the sale to the

station

The name of the family in which this work, acquired around 1915, remained, has not been revealed.

For his part, the director of the Impressionist and Modernist department of Sotheby's France, Etienne Hellman, said in a statement: “Very few paintings from Van Gogh's Montmartre period are in private hands, most of the series are currently part of prestigious collections museums around the world ”.

Scène de rue à Montmartre

has another peculiarity that makes it especially valuable from an artistic point of view.

In 1887, Van Gogh lived with his brother Theo in Paris, in the emblematic

Lepic de Montmartre, the Parisian neighborhood that already then attracted many artists with its mixture of rural and urban atmosphere, in which the mills that marked its landscape with the cabarets that brought together artists and intellectuals from all over Paris and all over Europe.

They were two "fundamental" years in his career because they would mark a before and after in his art, Hellman explained in a presentation of the work prior to its release on the market.

"In 1886, when he arrived in Paris, Van Gogh still used dark colors, browns, grays, more traditional colors, influenced by the Dutch school," he noted.

It is at

where “color is introduced for the first time in his work”.

Along with their hitherto usual dark tones, they begin to show “bright colors, very pure pigments.

It is an important painting because it is a transition painting towards the style that he would develop after his stay in Paris ”and his transfer to Provence in February 1888. In this painting,“ Van Gogh discovers color, light, with his friends (Georges ) Seurat and (Paul) Signac, who show him that the paint can come out directly from the tube without being mixed, ”Mirabaud said.

The last Van Gogh of his Parisian period was sold in New York in 2019 for $ 9.7 million, according to

It was a smaller work in size and, above all, without the bright colors that in Scène de rue à Montmartre already point to the next phase of the artist.

Before its sale,

was exhibited for a month in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Drout and Paris.