“From Garage Sale to Gallery: The Shocking Discovery Behind a $50 Painting That Could Be a Van Gogh Masterpiece Worth $15 Million!”
Genetic analysis of the hair showed that it had belonged to someone with either red or red-brown hair, which van Gogh did, if his self-portraits are to be believed.
Vincent van Gogh FoundationA self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh.
Moving beyond the hair, LMI Group employed Jennifer Mass, president of Scientific Analysis of Fine Art, to help analyze the components of the painting itself. What she found was that the thread count of the canvas matched other canvases of van Gogh’s era, as did the pigments used in the painting. There was one exception, however.
One pigment contained the organic compound PR-50, found in the geranium lake red pigment that was used to create the painting’s violet sky hues. That compound, however, was credited to a French patent from 1905-06 — while van Gogh took his own life in 1890.
But, as it turned out, PR-50 had been around for longer than that particular patent indicated. Patent lawyer Ben Appleton managed to trace a separate 1883 patent for PR-50 registered by the Colored Materials and Chemical Products of Saint-Denis in a Paris suburb. Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo happened to live in Paris and supplied the artist with paint, meaning it’s very likely van Gogh could have gotten his hands on this pigment well before the 1905 patent.
Then, there was the lettering found on the bottom right of the painting. While van Gogh notoriously neglected to sign the majority of his paintings, the style of writing did match the few other examples of van Gogh’s penmanship.
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