A Vincent Van Gogh landscape from early in his career will be sold at auction in Paris on June 4, the first auction of the artist’s work in France in more than 20 years.
Expected to reach between 3 to 5 million euros, the oil painting entitled “Fishing Net Menders in the Dunes” (“Raccommodeuses de filets dans les dunes”) has been on display in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for the past eight years.
Painted in 1882, the work was inspired by the countryside around The Hague, where Van Gogh passed a short but formative time focusing on his art.
In a letter to his brother Theo, he recounts how struck he was by the view of female peasants moving round the fields, their heads covered in white cloths, and this features prominently in the painting.
As the only landscape painted by the Dutch artist during this early period in his career, it contains many elements that would later become emblematic of Van Gogh’s work including heavy skies and crows, a motif which would resurface in his masterpiece “Wheatfield with Crows” (1890).
