A trader bought the painting Farmer in front of a farm of Vincent van Gogh in the sixties for only 4 pounds sterling, but next week the work should yield 15 million euros. For that price the painting is then offered at the TEFAF art fair in Maastricht.
It is an oil painting from 1885, on which a farm and a farmer’s wife are depicted. Van Gogh probably put it on canvas in Noord-Brabant.
Emma Ward, director of the London Dickinson gallery, said on Wednesday 1Limburg that the discovery of the work was “spectacular”. The painting appeared at a household auction in England in the 1960s. A trader paid £ 4 for it and put it in the window of his store.
A few months later, an Italian journalist bought it for £ 45. “He went to a curator with it at the time,” she says, “because he thought that the painting was a bit like Van Gogh. It turned out to be an original work.”
After that the canvas ended up in the collections of important American art collectors and now it is offered for sale in the Netherlands.
It is not the only work of the famous painter that is offered for sale in Maastricht. This also applies to a work that he painted in 1886.
TEFAF will be open for guests on 5 and 6 March. The exhibition is open to the public from Saturday 7 to Sunday 15 March inclusive.
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