Van Gogh Museum Won’t Attribute $50 Garage Sale Painting

A seemingly obscure portrait of a fisherman, titled Elimar, grabbed headlines earlier this week. That’s because a team of experts, citing “data-driven” research, believes the portrait—which an antiques collector bought at a Minnesota garage sale for just $50—was painted by Vincent van Gogh. However, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum has joined the conversation, saying Elimar was not, in fact, painted by the iconic Post-Impressionist.

New scientific methods of art authentication have grown increasingly popular amongst start-up tech companies—but not so much on the market. And, when it comes to authenticating the work of Vincent van Gogh, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is considered the principal authority on the matter. On Friday, January 31, the Van Gogh Museum announced that they had “considered the new information mentioned in the LMI Group’s Elimar report,” which details years of multidisciplinary research across hundreds of pages. The museum’s statement continued, “We maintain our view that this is not an authentic painting by Vincent van Gogh.”

The LMI Group published a swift response, claiming the museum “invested less than one working day to summarily reject the facts presented in our 458-page report without offering any explanation, let alone studying the painting directly rather than looking at it reproduced as a JPEG.” Elimar is not the first independently attributed work that the Van Gogh Museum has declined to authenticate. The LMI Group’s statement also cited “frequently revised opinions by the museum about the authorship of Van Gogh works.”

The LMI Group’s “Data-Based” Attribution

The LMI Group maintains the validity of its “data-based” attribution of Elimar to Vincent van Gogh, for which they spent years working with some 20 experts from various fields. Their 458-page report on the matter covers traditional connoisseurship, including formal analysis, provenance research, and historical context considerations. The LMI Group asserts that Elimar is Van Gogh’s interpretation of a similar painting, Portrait of Niels Gaihede, by Danish artist Michael Ancher. During the period they say Van Gogh painted Elimar, he produced multiple known “translations” of other artists’ works, such as Eugène Delacroix‘s Pietá lithograph.

The report on Elimar combines these traditional approaches to art authentication with newer scientific methods. For example, the LMI Group discovered a human hair embedded in the surface of the painting, which they submitted for DNA analysis. The report notes the hair was found to have belonged to a man and that scientists said it appeared to be red in color.

The LMI Group also employed an experimental handwriting analysis method. They compared the letters in “Elimar,” written in the bottom right corner of the painting, with handwriting examples on known Van Gogh works, such as the words “Emile Zola” written on Still Life With Bible. The team claimed the analysis found significant similarities in the characteristics of the letters. They also noted that Van Gogh did not sign all his canvases, as Elimar does not bear an artist’s signature.

The LMI Group could not determine how Elimar ended up in Minnesota, nor did they provide any provenance for the painting prior to 2016, when it turned up at the garage sale. However, they raised the possibility that because Van Gogh gave away several paintings during his lifetime, it is possible that one could have remained completely unknown to scholars until now. They also estimated the painting would be worth $15 million if its attribution was confirmed by experts at the Van Gogh Museum.

Richard Polsky, an art authenticator who was not involved in the Elimar research, discussed the difficulty of authenticating Van Gogh’s work with the Wall Street Journal. He said, “People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be wonderful if they found a Van Gogh—but they’ve got to pin everything down and get a scholar at the Van Gogh Museum to sign off on it.”