Van Gogh Museum Denies Attribution for Long-Lost Portrait
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam said on Friday that a long-lost portrait was, in fact, not by Vincent van Gogh, contradicting a 458-page report by the New York–based firm LMI Group International that claimed it was by the famed painter. The painting in question, titled Elimar (1889), depicts a fisherman with a round hat on his head and a pipe in his mouth. The fisherman appears transfixed as he repairs his net near a shore. The word “Elimar,” presumed to be the man’s name, is scrawled in the lower righthand corner. LMI Group said that the portrait would have been created while van Gogh was at the Saint-Paul psychiatric sanitarium in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. Van Gogh had checked himself into the sanitarium; he remained there from May 1889 and May 1890. Related Articles To assess the painting, LMI Group assembled a team of roughly 20 experts from a variety of fields, including chemists, curators, and patent lawyers. In 2019, the firm paid an undisclosed sum for the work, purchasing it from an anonymous antiques collector who found it …