Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. © Martin Bailey
An exhibition on the Belgian avant-garde artist Anna Boch includes an interior scene of her own apartment, with Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom hanging on her lounge wall. This discovery provides the earliest known image of a Van Gogh painting in a collector’s home after Vincent’s death.
Anna Boch’s Interior (1892) and Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom (April 1889)
Credits: Musées de Verviers (Joseph Deru-Jamoye bequest) and Courtauld Gallery, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
Boch’s Interior (1892, now Musées de Verviers), which is being lent to the Boch retrospective at Ostend’s Mu.ZEE modern art museum, shows just the left edge of Peach Trees in Blossom (April 1889, now Courtauld Gallery, London). This inclusion reveals her admiration for the recently deceased Dutch artist.
Anna Boch, an Impressionist Journey will be the most comprehensive exhibition on her work, opening in Ostend (1 July-5 November) and then presented at the Musée de Pont-Aven (3 February-26 May 2024). It includes 96 works by Boch, along with paintings by her colleagues Gauguin, Signac and Ensor.
Boch was the only female member of the progressive artists’ group Les Vingt (The Twenty) in Brussels in 1885–93. Van Gogh had been invited to exhibit with them in February 1890 and his work was also shown the following year, after his death.
In July 1891 Boch purchased Peach Trees in Blossom, paying 350 francs (then £14). Her Interior reveals that she hung the Van Gogh in a fancy frame, giving it considerable status.
Fifteen months earlier Boch had bought Van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard (November 1888, now at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow). This was the only identified picture which Van Gogh sold during his lifetime. On 22 February 1890 Anna had written in a previously unpublished letter to her brother Eugène: “It will look good in a corner of the living room” (Boch family archive).
Anna Boch’s Sheaves and Windmill (1912–15) and Van Gogh’s Sheaves of Wheat (July 1890)
Credit: V. Blondel collection (photograph Vincent Everarts) and Dallas Museum of Art (Wendy and Emery Reeves Collection)
Anna Boch was a great admirer of Van Gogh, who influenced her work. This can be seen in Sheaves and Windmill (1912–15), which has resonances with Van Gogh’s harvest scenes, such as Sheaves of Wheat (July 1890).
Sadly, neither of Anna’s two Van Goghs could be borrowed for the Ostend show (loans from Russia are now impossible after the invasion of Ukraine and the Courtauld had already promised their painting to a Detroit exhibition and did not feel they could lend again).
Van Gogh’s Portrait of Eugène Boch
Credit: Musée d'Orsay
But the Ostend exhibition will include the Portrait of Eugène Boch(September 1888), on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This was painted when the two men were working in Arles.
Letter from Theo van Gogh to Eugène Boch, 6 June 1890
Credit: Blondel family, Brussels (photograph Vincent Everarts)
The Ostend show will also unveil an unpublished letter from Vincent’s brother Theo to Eugène. Dated 6 June 1890, a month before Vincent’s suicide, Theo postponed a meeting with Eugène planned for two days later because of a last-minute decision to visit Vincent in Auvers-sur-Oise. Intriguingly, Theo wrote that he had to help his brother with an “installation”, probably the hanging of paintings.
Theo’s letter concludes that he wanted to show Eugène “my brother’s new work”. The Paris meeting was delayed until 22 June, with Theo reporting back that Eugène liked the paintings “very much, and it seems to me that he understands them”.
Anna sold both her Van Goghs in 1907 for “10 grand”, presumably 10,000 francs, thirteen times what she had paid. She spent part of the proceeds on Paul Signac’sSaint-Tropez, La Calanque (1906, now Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). Anna, who died in 1936, generously bequeathed her Signac to the Brussels museum.
Anna Boch in her studio in Ixelles (early 1930s)
Credit: private collection (photograph copied by Vincent Everarts)
Other Van Gogh news:
Van Gogh’s Landscape with a Farm (September-November 1883)
Credit: private collection (courtesy Drents Museum, Assen)
An almost unknown Van Gogh watercolour landscape painted in the north of the Netherlands is to be shown in Travelling with Vincent: Van Gogh in Drenthe at the Drents Museum in Assen (11 September-7 January 2024). Landscape with a Farm (September-November 1883) was probably done near Nieuw-Amsterdam/Veenoord. The watercolour, which has unusually rich tones for an early Van Gogh, is being reproduced in colour for the first time. It has always been in private collections, for the past 40 years with a Canadian family, and has never been exhibited. It is available on sale through London-based advisors Ars Docet.
Van Gogh’s Interior of a Restaurant (summer 1887)
Credit: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
A Van Gogh exhibition is to be held in Milan in the autumn. Vincent van Gogh: Artist and Reader will be held at the Museo delle Culture di Milano (Mudec), from 22 September to 28 January 2024. Forty Van Goghs, all from the Kröller-Müller Museum, will be presented, along with Japanese prints which he admired and books and illustrations which he enjoyed.
• Adventures with Van Gogh is taking a summer break, returning on 1 September
Martin Bailey is the author of Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln, 2021, available in the UK and US ). He is a leading Van Gogh specialist and investigative reporter for The Art Newspaper. Bailey has curated Van Gogh exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery and Compton Verney/National Gallery of Scotland. He was a co-curator of Tate Britain’s The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain (27 March-11 August 2019).
Martin Bailey’s recent Van Gogh books
Bailey has written a number of other bestselling books, including The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh's Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013, available in the UK and US), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence(Frances Lincoln 2016, available in the UK and US), Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, available in the UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln 2021, available in the UK and US). Bailey's Living with Vincent van Gogh: the Homes and Landscapes that Shaped the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, available in the UK and US) provides an overview of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, available in the UK and US).
To contact Martin Bailey, please email [email protected]. Please note that he does not undertake authentications.
Read more from Martin's Adventures with Van Gogh blog here.