After years of doubts about its authenticity, experts in Amsterdam have confirmed a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait was indeed painted by the Dutch master as he recovered in a French asylum from a mental breakdown.
Van Gogh Museum researcher Louis van Tilborgh dispelled the doubts Monday, saying the oil-on-canvas painting of the anguished-looking painter was completed in the late summer of 1889 while Van Gogh was at the Saint-Remy asylum in southern France.
Questions about the painting rose in the 1970s. The use of a palette knife to flatten brush strokes on Van Gogh's face and what were then considered to be unusual colors in the painting led to speculation about the authenticity of the work, which was bought as a genuine Van Gogh in 1910 by Norway's National Museum.
In an attempt to put those doubts to rest, the museum asked the Van Gogh Museum to analyze the painting in 2014.
"It feels really reassuring to know that its genuine," said Mai Britt Guleng of the Norwegian museum.
Van Tilborgh said the use of an unprimed canvas and a muddy green color were, in fact, typical of Van Gogh's time in Saint-Remy in 1889.
What sets the work apart is Van Gogh's use of a palette knife.
"So he has painted it and during the process he suddenly decides that it has to become flat," Van Tilborgh said. "We tend to think that it has to do with the fact that it's made during a period of psychosis."
Van Tilborgh said Van Gogh used painting as both a way of portraying his mental breakdown and of helping him to recover.
"He wanted to say in this picture that he was an ill person and so it's a kind of therapeutic work we tend to think," he said. "He was a Protestant and as a Protestant you have to accept the facts of life — if you suffer, you have to face the suffering."
The Oslo painting is the only work that can be linked to the self-portrait that Van Gogh described in a letter to his brother Theo on Sept. 20, 1889 as "an attempt from when I was ill."
Unlike those two later self-portraits, the Oslo self-portrait "firmly depicts someone who is mentally ill," the Van Gogh Museum noted in a press statement. "Van Gogh portrayed himself with his head slightly bowed and his body turned somewhat away from the viewer. His timid, sideways glance is easily recognizable and is often found in patients suffering from depression and psychosis.
"The expression on his face is lifeless and the image as a whole is dominated by a brownish-green, downbeat tone."
"Although Van Gogh was frightened to admit at that point that he was in a similar state to his fellow residents at the asylum, he probably painted this portrait to reconcile himself with what he saw in the mirror: a person he did not wish to be, yet was," said Louis van Tilborgh, senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum and Professor of Art History at the University of Amsterdam.
"This is part of what makes the painting so remarkable and even therapeutic," Tilborgh said. "It is the only work that Van Gogh is known for certain to have created while suffering from psychosis."
Norway's most famous artistic son, painter Edvard Munch, whose iconic work, "The Scream," also is a vivid expression of mental anguish, was fascinated by the Van Gogh painting.
"He thought it was one of the best of the collection of the national gallery but he also found it scary, because of the gaze from the self-portrait staring back at him," Guleng said.
The painting will remain on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam before returning to Oslo in 2021, when the National Museum, currently closed for renovation, reopens in a new building.
"When we delivered the painting in '14 they warned us and said 'You might not like the results and it might be that we will never find out,'" Guleng said. "So we were very happy when we got the news."
Newsmax writer Greg Richter contributed to this report.
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