Vincent van Gogh’s early work to go under hammer in France

This rural scene was painted early in the artist’s career and was inspired by the countryside around The Hague, where Van Gogh passed a short but formative period in terms of his artistic style. Bruno Jaubert, auctioneer from Artcurial auction house, said the work comes from very early in Van Gogh’s career, when he was painting working class people in his homeland. "He had only started painting two years before," he told AFP.

Van Gogh created it simultaneously with "View of the Sea at Scheveningen," which has been stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2002 by the Italian Camorra organized crime syndicate. The painting was later discovered miraculously in Naples just a couple of years ago, in 2016, with an ironical tip-off from a suspected drug trafficker.

Jaubert went on to describe the sale as an event of the art market where the opportunity as rare as this should definitely be cherished.
As the only landscape

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painted by the Dutch artist during this period in his career, it contains many elements that would later become emblematic of Van Gogh’s work, including heavy skies and crows, motifs which would resurface in his masterpiece "Wheatfield with Crows" in 1890.

The painting "Women Mending Nets in the Dunes" is scheduled to be sold at a Paris auction alongside five other minor works by Van Gogh’s dear friend Paul Gauguin. One of these paintings is a portrait of one of the childhood friends of the artist, Claude Antoine Charles Favre, and the portrait is expected to secure at the very least between €180,000 and €250,000.

It’s interesting to see the difference of estimation value of Van Gogh’s early works and works that represent the "typical Van Gogh", an artist with a recognizable style. Recall, the landscape

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"Enclosed Field with Ploughman. Saint-Rémy" — the first work, painted by Vincent Van Gogh in a shelter for the mentally ill — was sold in Fall 2017 at auction Christie’s for 81.3 million dollars. It is interesting also about the outcome of the upcoming auction Christie’s on May 15, 2018: one of the lots — a rare painting of Vincent Van Gogh "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" that once belonged to the Hollywood icon of Elizabeth Taylor. It was previously estimated at $ 35 million. A record price for the work of the neo-impressionist artist was paid in 1990: "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" went under the hammer also at Christie’s auction for 82.5 million dollars.

Title illustration: "Women Mending Nets in the Dunes", Vincent van Gogh

Based on materials from Artdaily.com, Reuters.com, website of Artcurial, Van Gogh museum