The artists Drents period featured notably dark and moody scenes
“Vincent returns home after 135 years!”, said Harry Tupan, director of the Drents Museum in Assen. The museum has purchased a painting by Vincent van Gogh from 1883: a painting he made in Drenthe. Director Tupan tells RTV Drenthe that he is very happy with the “homecoming” of Van Gogh’s painting.
The Drents Museum has worked with the Van Gogh Museum to purchase an early painting: “Weed Burning Farmer”, from 1883.
The painting will first be exhibited in Assen, during the Barbizon of the North exhibition in the Drents Museum.
The small work shows a lonely figure on a deserted plain at dusk, lit by a fire. Van Gogh painted it in Drenthe, where he stayed in the fall of 1883 and captured the landscape in paintings and drawings.
This is one of the few paintings from this period that have been preserved. The painting will alternately be displayed in the museums.
Harry Tupan, director of the Drents Museum is overjoyed: “Through this collaboration we have been able to preserve a Drents painting by Van Gogh for the whole Netherlands.”
Van Gogh lived in Drenthe for almost three months in 1883, where he was deeply impressed by the landscape of heather and peat. In his drawings and paintings he tried to capture the atmosphere and mood of the countryside in the autumn. He painted several landscapes in dark colors, sometimes with working figures. His letters show that he painted at least eighteen studies during his stay, but the majority of them were lost.
The painting, according to the NOS, was originally owned by the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who was based in Amsterdam. In the inter-war period, Goudstikker had made a name for himself dealing in Old Dutch Master paintings. Upon the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, he fled to the United Kingdom, but unfortunately fell and broke his neck on the voyage. Almost all of his paintings were looted by the incoming Nazi forces, and in 2006 many of them were restored to the only remaining member of Goudstikker’s family- his daughter in law Marei von Saher. Since then many have been sold at auction, to both private collectors and institutions.
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