$50 GARAGE SALE ART FIND TURNS OUT TO BE LOST VAN GOGH WORTH MILLIONS

There was a great deal of upheaval in the year before Vincent van Gogh passed away in 1890. The artist committed himself to a mental hospital in Southern France in 1889, where he produced about 150 paintings, such as Irises and Starry Night. There may be more work to add to that list, according to a thorough new study.

A painting that was originally purchased for less than $50 by an antique collector at a garage sale in Minnesota has been the subject of years of investigation by the art research firm LMI Group International. A white-bearded fisherman is shown in the painting fixing a fishing net by the sea, a pipe hanging from his lips. His eyes are thoughtful and almost dejected, and his face is tainted by deep smile lines and ruddiness. Elimar's name appears in the lower-right corner of the painting.

The painting's impasto, a style defined by heavily applied paint, initially piqued the collector's interest. The piece was sold to LMI Group in 2019 for an undisclosed amount, which sparked a multi-year research project involving some of the most renowned art historians and scientists in the world. The outcome? A 450-page report stating that Van Gogh is indeed the author of the painting. 

Van Gogh experimented with what he called "translation" while he was living in the asylum, reinterpreting other artists' paintings using his distinctive colour schemes and brushstrokes. He wrote to his brother Theo that he was "translating into another language, one of colours, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black," rather than "copying pure and simple."

The report from LMI Group claims that Elimar is a compelling illustration of a Van Gogh translation, seemingly influenced by the portrait of fisherman Niels Gaihede by Danish artist Michael Ancher.

According to a statement from LMI Group, "Elimar is based on a painting by Michael Ancher, a well-known Danish artist from the Skagen artist's colony to which Van Gogh was linked by Mette Sophie Gauguin, the Danish wife of Van Gogh's friend and artist Paul Gauguin." The diligent fisherman was a "subject to which both Gauguin and Van Gogh were drawn," the group continues.

William Havlicek, an art historian and researcher with the LMI Group, tells The Wall Street Journal, "I knew we were right as soon as we saw the Ancher."

There are other pieces of evidence linking Elimar to Van Gogh besides the Ancher painting. Following its recovery and testing, a hair embedded in the artwork was identified through genetic analysis as belonging to a person with red or red-brown hair. In many of his self-portraits, Van Gogh wears ginger hair.

Additionally, researchers discovered that the letters in the Elimar inscription of the work, particularly the Es, Ms, and As, matched those in an 1885 work that included a Bible and a book by Émile Zola. Even though Van Gogh didn't sign his paintings very often, the name "Elimar" was important even without a conventional signature. According to LMI Group, one of Van Gogh's favourite authors, Hans Christian Andersen wrote The Two Baronesses in 1848, and Elimar is one of its characters.

The reference links the painting to themes of life at sea and highlights Van Gogh's lifelong love of reading, according to LMI Group, which notes that Andersen was one of Van Gogh's favourite authors.

The painting's materials, which include an egg-white temporary finish that Van Gogh frequently applied to shield his canvases while he rolled them, are also consistent with a 19th-century attribution. In the end, there was proof that Elimar had been rolled. The anonymous buyer submitted the painting to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2019, but specialists concluded it wasn't a genuine Van Gogh. The new findings from LMI Group have not yet received a response from the museum.

"What the Van Gogh experts think of the artwork is ultimately what matters most," Robert Snell, co-owner and fine arts specialist at Revere Auctions in St. Paul, tells KARE.

In the upcoming months, LMI Group intends to present the painting to several Van Gogh experts and scholars. The painting's estimated value is $15 million, which is 300,000 times its original garage sale price.