After the data science art research firm LMI Group sent out a press release attributing the painting Elimar—which it owns—to Vincent van Gogh, there was surprisingly little of the “is it or isn’t it?” chatter that lost masterpiece stories usually generate. And as stories go, this one ought to be a crowd-pleaser. There’s the anonymous collector with a discerning eye who in 2016 bought the painting at a Minnesota garage sale, where it was stacked in a bin and priced at under $50. “Almost two years after buying the work, the original buyer came to see the brushwork and impasto as bearing a resemblance to paintings by van Gogh, which inspired him to learn more,” Max Anderson from LMI Group told Observer.
In other words, they knew they had something great on their hands, and so they reached out to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam but were rebuffed. That’s when LMI Group, helmed in part by Anderson (an art historian, museum director and former Met curator), stepped in, buying Elimar for an undisclosed sum. The company has since spent more than $30,000, according to the Wall Street Journal, to authenticate the orphan artwork with high-tech canvas weave analysis, Hausdorff measurements, FTIR and Raman spectroscopies and even DNA analysis—though not, the company notes in its 450-page report, artificial intelligence.
But even with all the science, it’s still seemingly mostly about the story. The press release calls Elimar, which was based on Michael Ancher’s Portrait of Niels Gaihede, “an emotionally rich, profoundly personal work created during the final and tumultuous chapter of van Gogh’s life.” The aforementioned report devotes nearly a quarter of those pages to “unexpected revelations into the mind and heart of van Gogh,” who allegedly painted the work in 1889 while confined at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Speculation abounds: “One of the reasons he made this remarkable work may have been to prove to himself that he was recovering from the psychotic breaks of the past year” … “Vincent adopted this name in what is effectively a fictive self-portrait to conjure the newly recovered man he wanted to be.” The painting, which LMI Group estimates is worth $15 million, is described as “a kind of resurrection in his last days, offering a glimmer of promise after the chaotic decades of his short life. In Elimar we are allowed imaginatively to travel through time and see Vincent mature, wise and content—at last.”
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A tl;dr version of the report would skip the 100+ pages of fluff and go straight to the historical context and scientific analyses. In brief, Van Gogh had an affinity for the sea and often painted laborers, including fishermen, and portraiture was central to his oeuvre. Van Gogh loved reading, and Elimar is a literary reference. The painting has compositional similarities to works by Gauguin and a pentimento that includes a woman who could be a reference to Sien Hoornik. The fisherman’s facial details are similar to those found in other Van Gogh works, and there are other technical similarities. There’s the late 19th-century pigment palette, including geranium lake made with PR50, which was patented in 1905 but might have been available to the artist in the year before his death. A canvas thread count similar to that of other Van Gogh canvases. A single red hair, confirmed male, embedded in the paint.
There’s also the fact that Van Gogh was a prolific interpreter of other artists’ work, particularly between 1887 and 1890. Not long before his death, he wrote to his brother Théo van Gogh that it’s “not copying pure and simple that one would be doing. It is rather translating into another language, the one of colors, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black.” He painted more than thirty translations while at Saint-Paul asylum—twenty-one were inspired by Jean-François Millet—putting his own spin on each work’s technical details, subject matter, composition and, most notably, the colors and brushwork. There is, in nearly all of his translations, very little ambiguity as to who was holding the paintbrush. Paintings like Noon – Rest from Work (1890) or The Man is at Sea (1889) or First Steps (1890) are just so delightfully Van Gogh-ish. Indeed, Théo wrote to Van Gogh to tell him that the “copies after Millet are perhaps the best things you have done yet.”
And that might be why LMI Group’s big reveal isn’t generating a lot of buzz. What fun is there in a rediscovered Van Gogh that doesn’t have any of the dynamism and vibrancy and movement that define this artist’s work? Several people have, in the days since the company announced its findings, reached out to Observer to suggest that the actual painter behind this work is a little-known Danish artist named Henning Elimar. They point to the application of paint in Elimar’s work Landskab med bro over å (Landscape with a bridge over a stream) being quite similar to that found in Elimar—particularly in the sky—as well as the fact that Henning Elimar’s signature on that particular work and some others looks quite a bit like the ELIMAR on the supposed Van Gogh.
There’s a lot of science to unpack in the LMI Group report, but what much of it confirms is that the work could have been painted in Van Gogh’s lifetime, which doesn’t preclude it having been painted in Henning Elimar’s. We all want to be that anonymous collector who finds a million-dollar masterwork at a garage sale. Most of us won’t be. Teri Horton’s $5 thrift shop find was not, in fact, a $50,000,000 Jackson Pollock. Don’t even get me started on the “Picassos” and “Chagalls” and “Basquiats” that even supposedly reputable small auction houses are willing to put on the block.
Still, Elimar could turn out to be a real masterpiece—I’m always ready to be surprised. The company will likely have a tougher time convincing the Van Gogh Museum, whose reply to the anonymous original buyer was a cut-and-dried “We have carefully examined the material you supplied to us and are of the opinion, based on stylistic features, that your work cannot be attributed to Vincent van Gogh.” LMI Group reached out to the museum with the lengthy report and received a similar response. They subsequently released a statement that asserted that the institution’s assessment policies “suggest that the museum lacks adequate resources to support an open and ongoing authentication process.”
One cutting but apt description of the alleged orphan painting comes from Reddit, where a user in r/ArtHistory called Elimar “a Van Gogh restored by Cecilia Giménez.” There’s really no getting around the fact that in addition to not being particularly Van Gogh-ish, this painting also isn’t particularly nice to look at, which is hard to reconcile when that artist’s work is so delightful to behold.
