Vincent van Gogh, “Garden at Auvers”

Vincent van Gogh spent the last two months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet, who was immortalized by the painter in many canvases. It was a very productive time for the artist, and it is estimated that he created one new canvas each day during this period. Some critics and connoisseurs of van Gogh’s work, however, question the authenticity of certain compositions created during that time, asking whether it is possible for the painter to have created over seventy of them in the seventy days leading up to his suicidal death. These doubts also concern one of the paintings that once belonged to the Leo Lewin collection in Breslau. It is about a canvas created in July 1890 depicting a garden.

The authenticity of the painting from Lewin’s collection has been extensively debated. When its longtime owner, Jacques Walter, put the canvas up for sale in Paris in 1992, the French government recognized it as a national cultural treasure and prohibited its export, but at the same time, it relinquished its right of preemption. Doubts about the originality of the canvas then arose, leading to a drastic reduction in its price. Ultimately, the painting found a buyer for a modest sum of 55 million francs (the estimated value of the canvas at that time was 200 million francs, or about 30 million dollars). The Supreme Court of France ordered the state to compensate Walter’s heirs with an amount of 145 million francs. Four years later, when the heirs of another owner of the canvas, banker Jean-Marc Vernes, wanted to auction it, media once again began to question its authenticity. Due to this media campaign, there were no takers for the painting. To conclusively determine whether the painting is an original, experts from the “Reunion des Musées Nationaux” analyzed it in 1999 and unequivocally recognized it as the artist’s own work.

One only needs to recall the dramatic “Crows Over the Wheat Field” housed in the artist’s museum in Amsterdam to understand the exceptional gentleness of the canvas depicting a garden. The painting, once owned by Lewin, shows a path and flower beds on a sloping lawn, enclosed by a boxwood hedge. The subdued palette of the canvas, dominated by various shades of green and blue, comes to life with just a few small red spots. Golden sunbeams fall on the path filling the lower part of the painting, which, painted almost pointillistically, seems to vibrate with light. The remaining surface of the canvas is covered with paint applied in short and delicate brushstrokes (e.g., groups of red flowers). Here, there is a lack of the artist’s characteristic boldness and expression. The decorative composition loses its lightness in the upper part. It’s as if, during the painting of the darkest portion of the image depicting the hedge, the emotions took over the artist, and the most appropriate expression for them was the nervous, interrupted strokes of a brush dipped in black paint, despite him standing amidst flowers in a sun-drenched garden. A few days after the creation of the canvas, van Gogh took his own life.

Painting Information:

oil on canvas, dimensions: 64.5 x 80.5 cm, currently in a private collection.

Literature:

Stephan Koldehoff, Van Gogh: Mythos und Wirklichkeit, Köln 2003.

Ingo F. Walther, Rainer Metzger, Vincent van Gogh: sämtliche Gemälde, Köln 2006.