A Van Gogh painting was sold for 13 million euros on Thursday in Paris, well above its estimate, which represents a record in France for the Dutch painter.
“Street Scene in Montmartre” dates from 1887 and was painted during Vincent van Gogh’s two-year stay in the French capital.
The painting was listed in catalogs with black and white photos, but had never appeared since it was acquired by a French family around 1920.
The painting was auctioned for an amount of 13,091,250 euros, costs included, during a sale organized by the auction house Sotheby’s France in video.
In 2017, “Plowman in a Field” (1889), painted by Van Gogh in the year before his death, in his Provencal period, the most colorful and also the most popular, had reached $ 81 million at Christie’s in New York. .
Sotheby’s and the Mirabaud-Mercier auction house, which had discovered “Street scene in Montmartre”, showed the public in February this masterpiece belonging to the very rare series of paintings representing the mythical Moulin de la Galette.
The work had been kept for a century within the same French family whose identity has not been disclosed.
The canvas represents the Pepper Mill, one of the Galette mills, behind palisades, against a blue-gray winter sky. In the foreground, a couple are walking and two children are playing.
