Christie’s Brings an Early Van Gogh to Hong Kong, Testing the Depth of China’s Appetite for the Artist
Christie’s is betting that the center of gravity for Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890) at auction has shifted decisively east. On March 27, the house will sell “A Girl in a Wood” (August 1883) in Hong Kong, with an estimate of $1.3 million to $2.6 million (HK$10 million to HK$20 million) — a comparatively restrained figure in the Van Gogh universe, but one that reflects the market’s long-standing hierarchy between his Dutch beginnings and his later French breakthroughs.
The painting belongs to Van Gogh’s The Hague period, when he was still testing oil paint and building a vocabulary of earthy tones and compressed space. In the composition, a small figure is nearly swallowed by a foreground tree whose roots spread across reddish ground. A narrow path leads into the middle distance, where a bright band of sky opens at the horizon, lending the scene a quiet, searching tension.
Christie’s and scholars have long treated the work as among Van Gogh’s earliest oils, traditionally dated to August 1882 and often discussed alongside a similarly titled “Girl in a Wood” now in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. But recent research by specialists at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum has pushed the Christie’s picture forward by a year, to August 1883.
The redating is not merely a matter of connoisseurship. Technical evidence points to a later moment in Van Gogh’s working practice: the Christie’s painting is executed on canvas, whereas in 1882 he was more typically applying oil paint to paper. Examination has also indicated that the work was painted on the same roll of canvas as a third composition, “Edge of a Wood” (August–September 1883), tightening the chronology around a brief, productive stretch.
The forest landscape was likely made in the Haagse Bos, a wooded area northeast of central The Hague and within walking distance of where Van Gogh lived. If the revised date holds, “A Girl in a Wood” and the related forest scenes would have been among the last paintings he completed in the city. Two weeks later, he left behind his girlfriend, Sien Hoornik, and departed for Drenthe in the north of the Netherlands.
Christie’s decision to place the work in Hong Kong underscores how dramatically the Van Gogh market has changed. The painting last appeared at auction in 2002 — also at Christie’s — when it sold for $670,000. It was acquired by a Chinese buyer: the Parkview property company and its chairman George Wong, who died in 2017. Last year, unconfirmed reports suggested Parkview had hoped to use the painting as collateral in a financing arrangement with Sotheby’s.
Wong was an early Chinese buyer of Van Gogh, but what was once exceptional has become routine. In recent years, as many as half of Van Gogh works sold at auction have gone to China, according to the report.
Auction houses have been building that market in Asia with increasingly ambitious consignments. Sotheby’s staged the first Western auction of a Van Gogh in Asia in 2021, selling “Still life: Vase with Gladioli” (August–September 1886) in Hong Kong for the equivalent of $9 million. Christie’s followed in 2024 with “Moored Boats” (July 1887), also in Hong Kong, which sold for the equivalent of $32 million.
“A Girl in a Wood” will be on view at Christie’s Hong Kong from March 24 until the sale three days later. Notably, it will not be exhibited by Christie’s in New York, and it received only a brief, low-key showing in London last month — a telling signal of where the house expects the most serious bidding to come from.
Arco Yu, co-head of the March 27 sale, said that “Asian clients are bidding on high-value Van Gogh works in Christie’s sales internationally, which is why we are offering his works here in Hong Kong.” Yu added that it is “very rare for Asian collectors to see an early Van Gogh,” positioning the pre-sale display as an unusual chance to encounter the artist before the familiar blaze of Arles and Saint-Rémy.
Separately, the Van Gogh Museum has expanded the context around the artist’s influences with a new acquisition: Virginie Demont-Breton’s “The Man is at Sea” (1889), a painting that inspired Van Gogh. The work shows a mother holding her baby by the fireplace, anxious for her fisherman husband at sea. While at the asylum outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Van Gogh saw a print after the image and wrote to his brother Theo in September 1889, calling it “a very pretty engraving.”
Together, the museum’s research and the auction house’s strategy point to a broader recalibration: Van Gogh’s early years are being newly scrutinized by scholars, even as the market for his work continues to globalize — with Hong Kong increasingly serving as a primary stage.
