(ANSA) - PARIS, 25 MAR - The rare painting by Van Gogh, with a view of Montmartre, dating back to the painter's Parisian period, was finally sold for 13,091,250 euros at auction at Sotheby's Paris.
The auction house announced it.
Dated 1887, painted during the scarce two years that Vincent Van Gogh lived in Paris, in his brother Theo's house at 54 Rue Lepic, "Street Scenes in Montmartre" was repertoire in catalogs (with black and white photos) but had never been shown. publicly since a French family had bought it around 1920. It was estimated at between 5 and 8 million euros.
Experts consider it important because together with another canvas with almost the same subject (today in Amsterdam) this Street scene in Montmartre, as well as witnessing the fascination that a great city in full change exerted on him, reveals his many contacts with the various Parisian avant-gardes. .
In Paris van Gogh attended and studied Monet, Gauguin, Pissarro, Renoir.
A few weeks before painting this particular picture he had met Signac, who will introduce him to the scientific theory of colors and then take him with him to paint around the city.
In short, a series of encounters that push the young painter to abandon the dark tones of his first works to develop a new palette that somehow already appears in this canvas.
His touch becomes lighter, the pigments are diluted, the light enters his paintings.
Street scenes in Montmartre, therefore, arises as a "hinge" work in the art of van Gogh, in which the artist, confronting the styles of modernity without completely embracing them, lays the foundations of his highly personal poetics.
(HANDLE).