A NEW van Gogh drawing in pencil, chalk and watercolour, showing a woman carrying a child, on a windy day, along a road in an unmistakably Dutch landscape was revealed yesterday by the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam.
Given that more is known about Vincent van Gogh's life and work than those of any other artist anywhere - thanks to the continuous stream of letters he wrote to his brother Theo - it seems almost inconceivable that new works should appear.
The existence of the unsigned drawing has long been known, though in 1930 it was listed among so called "false van Goghs" by J. B. de la Faille, then the leading expert in the field. Since that time its whereabouts have been a mystery. Now, after almost 70 years, it has suddenly appeared again, in circumstances which have allowed the museum to identify it, with 100 per cent certainty, as a van Gogh.
The story began in late 1994 when a Hamburg art dealer, Mr Thomas le Claire, acting for an anonymous German collector, requested the Amsterdam museum to pronounce on the drawing's authenticity.
It so happened that the Van Gogh Museum's curator of drawings, Mr Sjraar van Heugten, was and remains engaged in a monumental analysis of van Gogh's drawings. It is part of a complete re cataloguing of the museum's 450 van Gogh drawings and 100 sketches, by far the world's largest collection.
The study, which also refers to van Gogh drawings in other collections, is allowing Mr van Heugten to make detailed comparisons over a wider range of work than any single scholar has previously undertaken. He was already aware of a group of three drawings on identical sheets of paper with an easily visible "JV" watermark.
These had been possible to identify as a group since 1990 when another previously unknown van Gogh drawing was offered for authentication to the Kroller Muller museum in the Netherlands.
Cumulative evidence, depending mainly on the presence in one of the drawings of a model used by van Gogh in his tumultuous period in a studio in The Hague, had allowed Mr van Heugten to reassign this little group to April-May 1883 during the artist's residence there, rather than to a later stage in his Dutch career (before his move to France). Examining the "new" drawing from Hamburg, Mr van Heugten was now able to identify it as one more in the recently recognised Hague group of April-May 1883.
The rest of the early drawings go on display next month. More and even more surprising revelations are promised. The drawing will be on show until May 9th.