Axel Ruger, left, director of the Van Gogh Museum, and Louis van Tilborgh, right, a senior researcher, unveiled "Sunset at Montmajour" on Monday.
AMSTERDAM — The Van Gogh Museum here announced today that it has discovered a major new painting by Vincent Van Gogh. The work, entitled “Sunset at Montmajour,” was painted in Arles in 1888, a period that is considered to be the height of the painter’s career. It depicts dusk in the rocky landscape around Montmajour, a vineyard hill town in Provence, with the ruins of a Benedictine Abbey in the background.
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
“A discovery of this magnitude has never before occurred in the history of the Van Gogh Museum,” said the museum’s director Axel Rüger, in a statement. “It is already a rarity that a new painting can be added to Van Gogh’s oeuvre. But what makes this even more exceptional is that it is a transition work in his oeuvre, and moreover, a large painting from a period that is considered by many to be the culmination of his artistic achievement.”
Researchers at the Van Gogh Museum said they concluded the work was a van Gogh painting because the pigments correspond with those of van Gogh’s palette from Arles. Also, it was painted on the same type of canvas, with the same type of underpainting he used for at least one other painting, “The Rocks” (owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston) of the same area at the same time. The work was also listed as part of Theo van Gogh’s collection in 1890, and was sold in 1901.
Van Gogh moved to Arles in February 1888, and spent a great deal of time exploring the landscapes in Provence, and doing work “en plein air,” or in nature. He was particularly fascinated by the flat landscape around the hill of Montmajour with its rocky outcroppings and hay-colored fields and made several drawings of the ruins of the monastery, the olive trees, and the rocks jutting out of the hills. In a letter dated July 1888, he said that he’d been to Montmajour at least 50 times “to see the view over the plain.”
Describing the area to his friend, fellow artist Emile Bernard, he wrote: “It’s an enormous stretch of flat country, a bird’s eye view of it seen from the top of a hill – vineyards and fields of newly reaped wheat. All this multiplied in endless repetition, stretching away towards the horizon like the surface of a sea, bordered by the little hills of the Crau.” Another known painting of the landscape is “Harvest at La Crau – with Montmajour in the Background,” also of 1888.
The newly discovered work will be on view in Amsterdam starting on Sept. 24, as part of the current exhibition, “Van Gogh at Work,” which focuses on other new discoveries about the painter’s artistic development.
