Vincent van Gogh, with his life-spanning suffering both in career and personal matters, is the tortured artist's poster child. It's an unfortunate fact that only after his death at age 47 in 1890, by his hand, did the Dutch master achieve monumental economic and artistic success, which continues until today.
Such is the case for his 1888 painting which was previously owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and consequently sold for $117 million in 2022 at a Christie's New York auction.
However, there is one particular piece that he was able to sell while he was still alive, which stands alone among his oeuvre under this category. A painting that will be showcased by Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.
Red Vineyards near Arles (November 1888). Oil on canvas, 75 × 93 cm (29.5 × 36.6 in). Sold to Anna Boch. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Van Gogh's 'The Red Vineyards Near Arles'
The 1888 painting is the Dutch painter's only known sale to someone he is unrelated to, the deal of which he conducted following a public exhibition. The piece itself depicts its namesake located near Montmajour Abbey amid a grape harvest.
Its orange hues represent the low-hanging sun that showered the landscape and the workers toiling on it in crimson hues.
During the 1984 exhibition in New York's The Met Museum entitled "Van Gogh in Arles," the institution said: "His move from Paris to the Midi gave rise to bold experimentation in the use of color and to explorations of style and subject matter."
According to the museum, this resulted in work that "[marked] the height of his artistic development and a turning point in the course of nineteenth-century Western art."
The piece itself first made a public appearance during an annual exhibition's 1890 iteration, which was led by the Belgian art collective Les XX, or The 20. Anna Boch, one of the Belgian painters in this group, was the one who bought the "Red Vineyards" painting.
Although which price point varies per source, the painting was believed to have been sold at either 350 or 400 francs. Anna's brother and artist Eugène Boch, once sat across Van Gogh during a portraiture, which the Dutch master painted the same year he did the "Red Vineyards."
Van Gogh referenced this interaction when he wrote to his brother Theo, a letter that is currently held in the Van Gogh Museum's collection in Amsterdam. In the letter, he recalled that Anna paid the full "sticker price" even though she should have been given a "friend's price."
Eventually, Van Gogh's only known sale found itself in a Paris art gallery, where it was consequently purchased by Ivan Morozov, a Russian art collector.
The piece was then acquired by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts after Morozov was nationalized during the Bolshevik Revolution, where it is currently being showcased.
Although there are inklings that other pieces from Van Gogh's oeuvre were also sold before his untimely death, said paintings are still identified and their current location is equally obscured.
