Two Little-Seen Van Gogh Sketches From His Final Weeks Head to Christie’s Paris Sale
A double-sided sheet of drawings by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) — scarcely exhibited and largely absent from the standard illustrated record — is set to appear at auction this spring. Christie’s will offer the work in Paris on April 17, estimated at €100,000–€150,000.
The sketches date to Van Gogh’s last months in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village just north of Paris where he lived from May 1890 until his death on July 29 of that year. Although the drawings were shown briefly in Argentina in 1959, they have remained out of view for decades. A short mention appeared in the 1970 de la Faille catalogue raisonné without illustrations, and the sheet was omitted from the 1980 Hulsker catalogue. With the work now resurfacing, the Van Gogh Museum has confirmed its authenticity.
On the recto is “Pickers of Peas,” a scene of two clusters of women bent over in a field, their bodies described with quick, economical lines. The subject is rooted in the agricultural landscape Van Gogh would have encountered in Auvers: at the time, pea fields lay between the main road and the River Oise. The motif also has a visual precedent. In 1876, the French painter Charles Beauverie depicted female pea pickers in the same village, and an engraving after a similar Beauverie scene circulated — a print Van Gogh may have known.
Turn the sheet over and the mood shifts. The verso holds a spare landscape: two rows of trees framing a field, with hills and a single cloud set back in the distance. It reads less like a finished composition than a note taken in passing — a structure for a painting that might have followed.
That sense of intention is reinforced by Van Gogh’s own annotations. On “Pickers of Peas,” he wrote six color notations, from “vert bleu” (green blue) to “jaune” (yellow). On the landscape side, he added one word: “violet.” Such inscriptions suggest the drawings were conceived as preparatory studies for oil paintings.
No corresponding paintings are known to survive. Van Gogh may never have begun the canvases, or he may have abandoned them. Another possibility — more haunting — is that he completed the works and they were later lost. One painting that bears a loose, superficial resemblance to the landscape sketch is “Les Vessenots in Auvers” (June 1890), though it was not made from this drawing and may only depict a similar area.
The sheet’s provenance ties it directly to Van Gogh’s final chapter. It was first acquired by Dr. Paul Gachet, the physician who cared for the artist during his Auvers stay and tended to him after he shot himself in the chest. Gachet either received the drawing from Van Gogh or obtained it shortly after the artist’s death, and he reportedly hung it in his home alongside other Van Gogh drawings.
Gachet’s son, also named Paul, sold the double-sided sheet in 1954. It later passed through a Buenos Aires collection before entering a Spanish collection in 1990; the current consignment comes from the Spanish owner’s descendants.
Scholars have identified ten Auvers-sur-Oise sketches by Van Gogh that include color annotations, yet no oil paintings based on those particular studies are known to have survived. The newly surfaced sheet adds weight to a poignant implication: these were plans for future work, evidence of an artist still thinking forward — even in the weeks before his life ended.
Separately, another Van Gogh work has returned to public view in the Netherlands. “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Spring” (March 1884) is back on display at the Groninger Museum following its recovery after a 2020 theft while on loan to the Singer Laren museum. The painting was recovered in Amsterdam on September 11, 2023 — delivered in an Ikea bag — and has since been restored ahead of its redisplay.
