When Vincent van Gogh moved from Antwerp to Paris in February 1886, he'd only been painting professionally for less than six years. Upon arriving in the capital city, the 32-year-old Dutchman applied little color to his canvas. Yet, by the time he left Paris in 1888, a whole new spectrum of bold yellows, reds, and blues could be seen on each and every painting the legendary artist made. Indeed, the three years van Gogh spent in Paris were among the most pivotal in his decades-long career as an artist. And now one of the paintings he made during that epoch, which had long been considered a fraud, has just been verified by researchers as having been painted by van Gogh.
Vase with Poppies (1886) was completed shortly after Vincent arrived at his younger brother's home in Paris. Theo (then 28 years old) was in the midst of a successful career as an art dealer, peddling the works of such now-iconic artists as Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and Seurat, among others. In Paris, Vincent was in the center of the art universe. His eye was drawn to the works of his contemporaries that his younger brother was successfully selling. And while Vincent often cursed their styles, there's no doubting the fact that he was inspired by their colors and techniques.
Which brings us back to Vase with Poppies, a painting that shows a significant shift in van Gogh's oeuvre. The painting has been owned by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford since 1957. The work was considered an original until 1990, when art historian Walter Feilchenfeldt raised concerns about its authenticity. His rationale was that during that time, several works showing flowers in a vase said to have been painted by van Gogh were found to have been fraudulent. The work was immediately taken off the wall and shelved underground indefinitely.
That was until the museum decided to revisit the painting and use a battery of new technologies to study its originality. Shockingly, a digital X-ray revealed a painting underneath the flowers in a vase that appeared to be a self-portrait (a type of painting van Gogh began to home in on during his years in Paris). This led to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which also concluded that the painting was, in fact, an original.
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art plans to display Vase with Poppies again this April, which will mean the public will see it for the first time in nearly three decades.
