Mystery of the lost van Gogh

The authentication of an 1888 painting earlier consigned to an attic as a fake adds to Vincent van Gogh's tormented legacy

It is a painting by Vincent van Gogh of which Rabindranath Tagore might have approved. The foreground is entirely made up of a forest - not his better-known and well-loved cypresses but of oak trees and shrubs; the horizon is a lighter sky than the Nobel laureate might have preferred; in the foreground, as in his own Birbhum landscapes, hints of a waterbody peep through the French Arles vegetation, which Thakurda would have used to create reflections as in his own, somewhat dark works. But would the writer have identified with the painter's anguish? Would he have empathised with his schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, his mental illness accentuated by insomnia, possible malnutrition, overwork and alcoholism? Would he have forgiven him the syphilis that may have lain at the roots of his madness and which claimed his brother's life a mere six months after his own?

Viewed from the distance of a later century, there is something faintly romantic about Vincent van Gogh's life, yet the artist, who died probably of a self-afflicted gunshot wound in 1890, had not had a charmed existence. He went to his grave an anguished, tortured man, leaving behind a collection of 2,100 paintings, drawings, watercolours and woodblock prints, of which 860 were oil paintings that included Painting No. 180 which had disappeared from view and was considered lost. Painted in 1888 in the characteristic style of van Gogh's thick impasto from that period, it has recently resurfaced as Sunset at Montmajour. Shown to experts earlier, it had been mistakenly claimed a fake by them and disappeared from view.

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Vincent van Gogh was 35 years old in 1888, at the height of his creative expression, but had sold only one painting to date. Drawn to impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, whom he had befriended in the south of France, it was a time in which he painted some of his most significant paintings including, Sunflowers, The Yellow House and The Bedroom. But dogged by penury, ill-health and low morale, he cut off part of his left ear and wrapped it in a newspaper to give to a prostitute, telling her to send it to Gauguin whom he admired and loathed in equal measure. Some trace the genesis of the ear-cutting episode to a bar-room brawl between the two artists.

The artist described Sunset at Montmajour in some detail to his brother Theo who supported him for all of his career but whom he found frequently impossible to live with. "At sunset, I was on a stony heath where very small, twisted oaks grow, in the background a ruin on the hill and wheat fields in the valley," the artist wrote. Calling the setting "romantic", he described it thus: "The sun was pouring its very yellow rays over the bushes and the ground, absolutely a shower of gold."

Titled Sun Setting at Arles at the time, van Gogh sent it to Theo for keeping, claiming that it was "well below what I'd wished to do". This is when things get complicated. Two years later, van Gogh committed suicide (or was accidentally killed, according to newer, unsubstantiated theories), but at any rate his brother's death soon after meant that the estate was broken up and sold. Posthumous recognition was not long in coming, and soon van Gogh's works were being coveted by collectors. Sun Setting at Arles was bought by French art dealer Maurice Fabre in 1901, the year that a retrospective on the artist was organised, and then by Norwegian industrialist and novice art collector Christian Nicolai Mustad in 1908. When France's ambassador to Sweden mentioned to Mustad that he doubted the authenticity of the painting, Mustad - probably embarrassed by his foray - had it consigned to an attic where it unfortunately lay till his death in 1970. Not that it was resuscitated then. Called in by the family, art dealer Daniel Wildenstein dismissed it as probably the work of some lesser-known German artist - and it was in that consideration that it was resold to a collector.

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The identity of that buyer has not been revealed by the Van Gogh Museum, nor that of its current owner who sought its authentication in 2011. Based on van Gogh's letters describing the 37' x 29' painting, its chemical analysis of pigments and x-rays of the canvas, experts have finally authenticated it as painted by the tortured artist. Though a lesser work by the artist's own admission, it is characteristic of his distinctive brushstrokes and worth several million dollars. In 1990, for instance, the somewhat morose portrait of the artist's attending doctor, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, painted in 1890, sold for $82.5 million. Prices have since risen, in part due to the buying power of the Chinese, and Sunset at Montmajour may well be valued at upwards of $100 million.

If the later works were distinguished by van Gogh's impasto brushstrokes, his earlier The Potato Eaters won him opprobrium at the time for using peasants as models, at least one of whom accused him of molestation, leading to an estrangement from society that would characterise his short life and career thereafter. Art historians have attributed two versions of his Daubigny's Garden, completed in July 1890, two years after Sunset at Montmajour, as the last paintings made by him, while incomplete ones include Thatched Cottages by a Hill. If the "lost" painting from his Arles years adds a significant discovery to his legacy, it also begs the question why Indian artists, otherwise influenced by his peers, found so little inspiration in his paintings, preferring the brighter palette of impressionism to his more sombre hues.