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>>> Rare Van Gogh Sells for €7 Million in Paris


By Beckie Strum

June 5, 2018



https://www.barrons.com/articles/rare-van-gogh-sells-for-7-million-in-paris-1528235831



A rare work by Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh sold on Monday at a Paris auction for €7 million (US$8.3 million), a record price for a landscape from the artist’s Dutch period.

In 1882, Van Gogh painted Fishing Net Menders in the Dunes—a depiction of white-capped figures laying out fishing nets in the countryside outside the Hague, Netherlands. In the end, it was an American buyer who pushed bidding at the auction, held near the Champs-Elysee, past the painting’s €3 million to €5 million (US$3.5 million to US$5.86 million) estimate, said the auctioneer Artcurial.

Bruno Jaubert, deputy director of Impressionist and Modern Art for Artcurial, referred to the intense bidding, in a news release, as “battle of the titans” among several North American and European collectors.

The work, the first Van Gogh to sell at auction in Paris in more than 20 years, was on display for decades in major museums, and most recently hung at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, on loan from a private collector.

The artist was smitten with the colors and scenery in the rainy Dutch countryside, and likened the peasant women he painted to “strange dark ghosts” in a letter to his brother, Theo.

While significant, the sale was far from his most expensive work. Portrait of Dr. Gachet, showing a medic who cared for him at the end of his life, sold in 1990 for US$82 million.

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