This has been the best year for Van Gogh exhibitions in decades, with a series of shows breaking new ground. Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: His Final Months, which opened in Amsterdam and still has a month to run in Paris, is the most important of all. The 47 paintings that were presented provide a comprehensive view of the art done byVincent just before his death. The artist lived in Provence before moving to Auvers and he used cypress trees as one of his favourite motifs. The Museum of Modern Art in New York lent his most popular landscape, Starry Night, to the show. The Van Gogh along the Seine opened at the Art Institute of Chicago and went on to Amsterdam, where it will remain until 14 January 2024. It shows Van Gogh's links with fellow avant-garde artists who painted in the Parisian suburbs. Van Gogh and Still Life: From Tradition to Innovation was one of the notable shows of the year. The Van Gogh's Garden is in front of a farm.
The most expensive Van Gogh work sold at auction this year was Garden in front of the Debray Farm, which went for $23m on May 16th. The painting was done at the top of the Montmartre hill. The price may seem modest compared with the work of Van Gogh, which sold for $117m in 2022, but it was painted a year later when Van Gogh was in Provence and was at the height of his powers. Two paintings that were done in the Dutch village of Nuenen were up for auction this year. Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) was sold for over five million dollars. The Peasant Woman by the Wash Tub was the most expensive of the four early Van Gogh drawings. The Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet was sold in three different versions.
The most surprising sale of the year was the lithograph of Old Man drinking Coffee, which sold for 275,000. The print with minor watercolour additions was bought by a research assistant at the Van Gogh Museum. Hageman gave it to the Van Gogh Museum on a long-term loan and it will eventually become a bequest. The Van Gogh, The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen, which was stolen from the Groninger Museum in the spring of 1884, has been recovered. The art was recovered by the Dutch private art detective Arthur Brand. The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen, just minutes after its recovery, was photographed by Arthur Brand.
The inn where Van Gogh spent his formative years and the visitor centre were both renovated last year. This year's bumper crop of shows is great because so much new research on the artist is published in exhibition catalogues. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York has a story about Van Gogh's Beach at Scheveningen in Calm Weather.
One of Van Gogh's earliest oil paintings, Beach at Scheveningen in Calm Weather, is one of the 200 works Dick Wolf donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will be joining the finest collection of Van Gogh's work outside the Netherlands and France.