Just some sketches, a long time ago
“Drawing is the backbone of all art,” Vincent Van Gogh once wrote, voicing a weary truth that’s nevertheless undermined by the fact that paper makes for a vulnerable spine. How many thousand would-be treasures by the masters have flown off with the wind and been consumed by time, never to be seen again?
And yet drawings by Van Gogh continue to reappear in the present, back like Van Winkle from presumed demise. Even 118 years after Vincent’s death, a notebook has been submitted to the experts to decide if it was his. One of its pages is shown above, another here. Further down is a sketch recently found, already authenticated and up for sale.
The sketchbook of some 60 pages was found in a storage box in an Athens home by the daughter of a Greek resistance fighter, Reuters reported in January this year. He evidently took it from a train carrying Nazi loot at the end of World War II.
One expert has said it’s Vincent’s work, and now Doreta Peppa is awaiting confirmation from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. If she gets it, she believes the book could be worth at least four million euros, although she says, “I don’t want it to leave my hands.”
Uncovered along with a photo that Peppa says shows Vincent, the sketchbook bears a Nazi stamp and the mark of the Brussels Royal Academy of Art. Van Gogh moved to the Belgian capital in 1880.
At its sale of “Modern & Contemporary Art” in Amsterdam on June 25, Sotheby’s sold “Old Man and Woman” (”Oude Man en Vrouw”), drawn in 1882 in carpenter’s pencil and rubbed lightly here and there with a lithographic crayon, for 108,750 euros.
Calling it a “recent” find, the auction house says it’s only the eighth drawing to be positively attributed to Van Gogh since 1970, which gives an indication of what Doreta Peppa is up against in her quest for authentification.
“Because of the rarity of such a discovery,” Sotheby’s notes, the Van Gogh Museum devoted a special presentation to it in February and March. See the rest.
