This $50 Garage Sale Find Might Be A Lost van Gogh Painting Worth $15 Million Dollars

When Vincent van Gogh admitted himself into a French asylum in 1889, he ended up staying for a year, and in that time, he created about 150 paintings.
He also painted many interpretations of other artists’ work, which he called “translations,” adding his own spin to them.
Now, experts have identified a long-lost van Gogh translation—an oil portrait of a fisherman. An antique collector purchased the piece for $50 at a garage sale in Minnesota.
In 2019, the collector sold it to the art research firm LMI Group International for an undisclosed amount.
Since then, researchers at the company have been investigating the painting. Recently, they released a detailed 450-page report concluding that it was a work of van Gogh.
The 18-inch-tall portrait at the garage sale caught the collector’s eye due to its impasto, a technique that involves thickly laid paint.
It depicts a man with a white beard smoking a pipe by the sea and repairing a fishing net. His face has red cheeks, smile lines, and downcast eyes that make him appear to be deep in thought.
The bottom right corner of the painting contains a signature: the word “Elimar.” There was also a strand of hair dried into the paint.
The LMI Group analyzed the fibers and pigments of the canvas. Van Gogh’s vivid colors were not present, but the brushwork indicated that it was produced by a skilled artist.

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One particular red pigment called geranium lake, or PR-50, raised doubts about the artist’s identity. Van Gogh took his own life in 1890, and researchers have always thought geranium lake was first patented around 1905.
So, a patent lawyer was brought in to search for an earlier patent, which resulted in the discovery of an 1883 patent for PR-50.
A genetic analysis of the hair stuck in the painting revealed that it belonged to someone with red or red-brown hair.
According to van Gogh’s 35 self-portraits, he had red hair. Additionally, the letters in the painting’s “Elimar” inscription matched those in an 1885 van Gogh piece.
Elimar is the name of a character in The Two Baronesses, an 1848 Danish novel by Hans Christian Andersen, one of van Gogh’s favorite authors, per the LMI Group.
The report stated that van Gogh painted Elimar in 1889. Experts believe that Elimar is a translation of Danish artist Michael Ancher’s piece of fisherman Niels Gaihede.
Soon, the LMI Group will be showing Elimar to art dealers and scholars. They estimate that the artwork is worth at least $15 million. However, not everyone is convinced of the painting’s authorship.
The painting was submitted to the Van Gogh Museum in 2019, but experts ruled it was not authentic. The museum has not yet responded to the new report.
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