Breaking van Gogh

Given that both versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses, those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s National Gallery, had passed through Emile Schuffenecker and the first grand retrospective Vincent van Gogh exhibition, set up by the forger’s friend Julien Leclercq, more experts should have looked at those two paintings and questioned their relationship and authenticity. The fact that they have never truly been examined, except at each of their respective museums, makes one wonder about the process of vetting a van Gogh.

To return to the idea of the National Gallery canvas being owned by Père Tanguy, let us look at the surviving records and beyond, to the man who owned his art-paint shop and gallery until he died in 1894.

With the A. B. List coming up empty for the painting, an entry of “cypresses” in the online Van Gogh Letters database reveals a dozen letters pertaining to the asylum period from June 25, 1889, when the drawing subject was first discussed, until the end of that year. Over those six months, there were twelve letters associated with “Cypresses” (from the Wheat Field with Cypresses title) and of those, only eight refer to the painting specifically.

That search also produces ten more letters from 1890 that relate to the word but do not link to the subject, extending to the end of Vincent’s stay at the asylum and final months of his life at Auvers-sur-Oise.

Given that the written record comes up empty on anything having to do with the National Gallery’s Final version being given or sold to Tanguy, who was the man Père Julien Tanguy?

In his book Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Peter Gay provides insight into Tanguy’s manner and personality, writing:

His large canvases sold for 100 francs and the small ones for 40—this was the tariff set by Julien Francois Tanguy, that hospitable, almost proverbially benevolent dealer in art supplies whom the Impressionists frequented in Paris. An average laborer, assuming he had any money for art, could have managed a small Cézanne for three, perhaps four weeks’ work, but there is no record of any potential buyer from that class making his way to Tanguy’s shop …

Père Tanguy was wiser than they; he took paintings in payment for the colors he sold to his impecunious customers. For years his unpretentious shop, crowded with artists who came to admire—at times to jeer—was the only Parisian gallery where Cézannes were on view.

Van Gogh more than once captured père [sic] Tanguy’s benign, bearded face and stocky frame for posterity. Born in Brittany in 1825, an uncompromising political radical, Tanguy all his life skirted the edge of penury, working as a plasterer and after he moved to Paris in 1860, as a color grinder.

Theo paid Tanguy for the rare pigments and paints that he made and shipped down to Vincent, as the young sibling supported his older artist brother for years. That fact can also be found populating the van Gogh letters, stretching from Vincent’s time in London, Holland, and down in Paris and the south of France. These payments show up in the account book that Theo kept, which included records related to Vincent’s artwork and the dates and purchases of supplies. The book was then used by his widowed wife, Jo, for another decade after his death.

In 2002, the Van Gogh Museum made the account book of Theo van Gogh and Jo van Gogh-Bonger public for the first time. We can see the written records of purchases of supplies and, later, the monthly fees for storing Vincent’s growing collection of paintings. Like the van Gogh letters, this too comes up empty for any gift or sale of the painting to Père Tanguy, so his shop and gallery can be ruled out as ever being the owner of the National Gallery’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses at any point in the 1890s.

Thus, all signposts point back to only one version going through Schuffenecker’s hands in December 1900 after Jo van Gogh-Bonger’s sale of eight paintings to the minor artist.217 One Wheat Field painting was put on exhibit at Bernheim-Jeune, but two versions showed up after the exhibition and were sold five years apart.

Did Schuff need the thick imitation impasto brushstrokes to thoroughly dry? Did he want to age the painting a little bit before putting it on the market, the way the 1990s forgers of seventeen Jackson Pollock lost paintings accelerated that effect by making “the paintings look older with tea and dirt”?218 Verily, tea and dirt existed in abundance in Schuffenecker’s world in Paris at the turn of the century.

Speaking about a number of other paintings, authors Born and Landais noted in Schuffenecker’s Sunflowers:

The Berlin picture was nothing but a reduced copy, but Vincent’s “Wheat Field with Reaper” also inspired Schuffenecker to do harvest scene “adaptions,” which after the 1901 Bernheim exhibition, he successfully peddled as “van Goghs.”

It was a tall order for Schuffenecker to try to match Vincent’s very yellow and very clear wheat field, his simple and beautiful motif. Not only would he never be able to share the intensity of Vincent’s emotions and the depth of his thinking, but harvest scenes were just not his thing. He was, as Gauguin said, a denizen of Paris with little feeling for work in the fields.219

What the authors show is that the artist-turned-forger was already practicing the art of the con by the time the Bernheim-Jeune Exhibition went live in 1901, that he was already doing mockups of van Gogh-style landscapes, and that problems of copying van Gogh came down to the absence of Tanguy’s paints, custom-made pigments that Schuffenecker couldn’t reproduce at the turn of the century.

R. Alexander “Alex” Boyle—the son of a Field and Stream and Sports Illustrated writer, a marine who served in World War II and went on to found Riverkeepers, an environmental organization that set out in the 1960s to keep big industry from polluting the Hudson River above New York City—didn’t follow his father’s footsteps into either journalism or the military. But Alex Boyle did take his passion and expertise for nineteenth-century art to the Hudson Valley. Boyle worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s, and in 2002 he collaborated on a PBS art history film with Bill Moyers on an exhibition of Hudson Valley nature artwork at the Hudson River School, in which he “paired twenty famous Hudson River School paintings to images of the Modern Day.”220

In examining the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses from an artistic perspective, Alex Boyle has long suspected the painting is a forgery, albeit an old forgery.

In our discussion in summer 2013 about the likelihood of the painting being a fake, Boyle looked beyond the lack of “impacted impasto” and clear cracking that looked like a dry riverbed in the National Gallery version. He called out the amateurish shadow in the mountaintop of Les Alpilles, and the smeared brushstrokes of the clouds in the Met’s canvas, which do not resemble the iconic swirls of van Gogh’s Saint-Rémy landscapes, the halo-like stars in Starry Night, and the clouds in Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Paul Hospital.

During this series of interviews conducted over the phone and face to face in Westchester County, New York, Boyle said, “The Metropolitan Museum of Art example not only has zero ‘impacted impasto,’ in side-by-side comparisons to the London example it looks like a crude copy by another hand. Perhaps the work of Emile Schuffenecker was one guess. Fleeting cloud shadows in the UK work [A Wheatfield, with Cypresses] seem instead in the Met to sink like ‘blue blobs’ atop hills delineated if only by crude outlines; the differences in draftsmanship border upon the staggering.”

Not content only with subjective issues (even though the brushwork is clearly vulgar by van Gogh standards), Boyle also said there was plenty of other evidence showing that painting to be a fake. (He would end up writing about it, after this author published the article “Hacking van Gogh: Is the Master’s ‘Fingerprint’ Missing from a Met Painting?” in the Huffington Post on July 10, 2013. Alex Boyle would publish his detailed exposé about the painting in Art, Antiques & Design, an online art magazine, on August 2, 2013, titled, “The Met van Gogh Story Trains Keep Rolling By.”)

Vincent’s favorite color, emerald green, copper-acetoarsenite, a.k.a. Malachite, is one I am uniquely familiar with as a result of having co-authored a book on “Acid Rain” years ago. As Professor Richard Bopp of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute explained to me when I asked him why copper gates dissolved around ornate marble mausoleums, or even in New York Harbor, the way the Statue of Liberty did (indeed to such an alarming state it was in dire need of its famous 1986 restoration), he said, “Alex, copper does not want to be a shiny brown piece of metal, it wants to carboxylate and turn into liquid green slag. In short copper in its pure form is unstable, and malachite (emerald green) is a transitional state en route to decomposing.”

Vincent’s choice of his favorite green color and its eventual chemical fate is a part of how to determine if the one at the Met is right. I don’t think it is, but given the exhaustive table of chemicals and elements Anthony Reeve listed in his 1987 Technical Report on the UK work, well maybe the Met has good reason not to show you what the one in New York is made out of. Not only is it in atypical condition, perhaps it is made out of entirely a different set of pigments.

Boyle then shifted to canvas types, pointing out that Vincent “experimented with different canvas types in his search for the one that absorbed well” after he primed the canvas with his lead white paint. “Vincent was dissatisfied with the local supplier, with the first consignment of a finer type of canvas from Tasset et L’Hôte. In July 1888, he decided to work only on their Toile Ordinaire, which, with a few exceptions, he did until the end of his life,” Boyle explained.

He added, “The Toile Ordinaire came shipped in a roll, in a raw state,” with its thread count, or warp/weft, described in Van Gogh Museum van Gogh expert, Louis van Tilborgh, et. al.’s Weave Matching and Dating of Van Gogh’s Paintings: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which explained in detail:

The various types are distinguished by slightly different average thread counts (warp by weft) per square cm: 11.5 by 18 (fifty-six paintings), 11.5 by 17 (twenty-seven) and 12 by 15.5 (twenty-three). At present there are eight canvases with an average thread count of 11.5 by 15.5 per square cm., which could indicate the use of a fourth type of toile ordinaire from Tasset et L’Hôte. However, in view of the small number of works involved and the fact that the dates of execution extend over the period August 1888 to July 1890, we are assuming for the time being that the canvases actually belong to the match clique with an average of 12 by 15.5 threads per square cm, although they have not been counted among the twenty-three pictures in that group.221

was that very state made it easier to take off the stretchers, once dry, roll right back up into a tube and ship the completed work north to Theo in a crate via rail post train, or as the French would say, Chemin de Fer. Tasset had other canvases with a higher thread count called ‘Fine’ and ‘Très Fine.’ Likely though, these had higher thread counts per centimeter, similar to a nice shirt that has been starched and pressed, must have been much more difficult to roll up, so there was a method to his madness as Vincent navigated the logistical problems shipping completed canvases via French rail post. The Van Gogh Museum report has taken this analysis of fabric to such a level that they can identify which paintings in their collection were cut from the same bolt of fabric, which helps date a work to February 1890 in Saint-Rémy rather than an earlier erroneous description of June 1890 Auvers-sur-Oise, as was the case in one work cited.

The Van Gogh Museum has previously looked at Emile and Amedée Schuffenecker’s restoration work and published its findings in the museum’s 2001 Journal:

They also retouched the edges and even added a wide strip at the top. Moreover, similar additions to the picture area are found in three other works from the collection of either Emile or Amedée: in the first version of van Gogh’s Daubigny’s garden (F 777 JH 2105), his Portrait of Camille Roulin, and in Gauguin’s Human miseries. Altering the format of 19th-century paintings does not appear to have been common practice, but seems instead to have been a personal predilection of the paint-restorer’s.222

Another van Gogh example they examined in the same report came from Schuffenecker’s friend Julien Leclercq and was the Annenberg-acquired Cypresses, which the philanthropist donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after his death in 2002:

Van Gogh’s “Cypresses” (F 613 JH 1746), which belonged to Julien Leclercq, has a similar canvas addition at the top, with associated overpainting. However, in this case the addition is quite small, some 1.5 cm wide. More research is required to confirm that this addition is of later date.223

There was a story in 1934, related by the assistant of the renowned Swiss art collector Otto Ackermann—who attended the 1901 art exhibition in Paris and knew the Schuffenecker brothers—that in the autumn of that year, “Ackermann had brought together the pictures” for a van Gogh exhibition in Berlin,

among them some were owned by Amedée Schuffenecker. When, at the time of the exhibition, he happened to visit Mr. Schuffenecker, he saw, hanging on the wall a repetition of one of the pictures that was in Berlin. When he inquired about its provenance, Amedée Schuffenecker explained that he had had the painting copied as a “souvenir,” in case of a sale in Berlin! Supposedly the copyist of these pictures had not been the dealer’s brother, the painter Emile Schuffenecker, as is often claimed today, but a young painter, who shortly after he had been involved in a court case took his own life.