Email Xeno
Follow(Twitter)
Subscribe
Thanks
Museum discovers ‘new’ Van Gogh painting
Posted by Xeno on March 23, 2012
A painting dismissed for years as the work of an unknown artist has been identified as a piece by Vincent Van Gogh, after x-rays revealed an image of two wrestlers fighting underneath the floral still life.
“Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses” has hung in the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in the town of Otterlo, in the eastern Netherlands, since 1974, but doubts over its authorship have dogged the painting for decades.
Experts argued that the large format, the location of the signature, and the huge number of flowers in the composition all suggested the painting was the creation of an unidentified artist, rather than the famed Dutch painter, and the work was officially “dismissed” from his catalogue in 2003.
“There were so many questions around this painting,” explained Teio Meedendorp, researcher at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. “There were a lot of things about it that were strange — it couldn’t quite be trusted [as a piece by Van Gogh].”
But the latest high-tech x-ray imaging has allowed scholars to re-examine an underpainting, featuring two wrestlers fighting, first glimpsed in the 1990s, and confirm that the picture is indeed by Van Gogh. …
