One of Vincent van Gogh's first paintings has sold for several million euros at the Maastricht art fair, one of the most prestigious in the Netherlands. As reported this Sunday by its former owner, the painting Head of a Peasant with a White Headdress was offered for 4.5 million euros at the TEFAF (The European Fine Art Fair), and its buyer is apparently a museum outside the Union European.
"It has been sold to a museum outside the European Union," confirmed Bill Rau, president of M.S. Galerie Rau, one of the largest and best-known galleries in the United States, based in New Orleans, which had put the painting up for sale. But "we can't talk about the price," Rau said via email. However, according to the Dutch national news agency ANP, the purchase price "has been equal to the original sale price." The painting "will be accessible to the public," specifies the ANP, although it does not provide the name of the museum.
Van Gogh painted this painting when he lived with his parents in the town of Nuenen, in the south of the Netherlands. In 1885, he painted his famous painting The Potato Eaters in the same place.
Jewelry by Joaquín Sorolla, Antoni Tapies, Manet, Rubens and Rodin, among many others, are also passing through this fair. But without a doubt one of the works that has attracted the most attention is the Kandinsky recovered from Nazi looting. This is View of Murnau with the church, valued at 50 million dollars and recovered in 2022 after a long legal dispute.
Painted in 1910, Kandinsky's masterpiece was at the center of controversy for years in the Netherlands because the work was looted by the Nazis during the war and has been in the possession of a Dutch museum since 1951. The heirs of Johanna Margarethe Stern -Lippmann (1874-1944), a German Jewish art collector who was a victim of the Holocaust, have demanded its return for years and only managed to recover the painting in 2022, to auction it the following year. The current owner purchased it for $45 million last year at Sotheby's in London.
Art dealer Robert Landau, who bought the painting, did not want to reveal the sale price, but told the AFP agency that the work had recently been valued at "100 million euros."
"The world knows what we paid for it and we will only sell it to someone we love and who keeps it in a nice place," declared Robert Landau before the official opening of the fair.
