A screen of Vincent Van Gogh, painted at the beginning of his career, was auctioned for more than 8 million dollars in Paris, in an unprecedented sale in more than 20 years in the French capital, announced this Monday (4), a casa Artcurial.
The painting “Raccommodeuses de filets dans les dunes” (Net repairers in the dunes, from 1882) was sold for 7,065,000 euros (US$ 8.23 million) from an American collector.
The work had an estimated value of between 3 and 5 million euros and was purchased “after an arduous battle”, according to the auction house.
Artcurial reported that it is a “world record for a Van Gogh landscape from the Dutch period”.
The work was painted when the artist was 29 years old.
“Painted in August 1882, the work encompasses all the premises of the pictorial revolution of the author of ‘Starry Night’”, according to the house.
In it, “all the characteristics of Vincent’s painting stand out, especially the treatment of landscapes, which give the main place to the earth, with highly crafted skies”, highlighted Bruno Jaubert, associate director of the modern art department at Artcurial.
Van Gogh painted it in the countryside near The Hague, which he “captured very vividly,” Jaubert noted.
The former owner, a European collector, had lent the work for several years until 2015 to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.
The Montreal and The Hague museums exhibited it successively between 1960 and 2010. Before the sale, it was exhibited in Paris, and later it will be in Brussels and New York.
The last auction of a work by Van Gogh in Paris dates back to the 1990s, when “The Garden of Auvers” fetched 10 million dollars.