Vincent van Gogh – Still Life with Daisies and Poppies.
A Still Life by Van Gogh, the finest to appear at auction in decades, will come up at Sotheby’s evening sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York on November 4. Vincent van Gogh’s Still Life, Vase with Daisies and Poppies was painted at the home of Dr. Paul Gachet just weeks before the end of Van Gogh’s life. The artist uses the richly-colored bouquet of wildflowers to convey his psychological state at the time – a hallmark of the Expressionist icon. The resulting composition teems with the intense energy, emotion and sensitivity of this creative genius at the height of his short but renowned career. Still Life is one of the few works that Van Gogh sold during his lifetime, one of only a handful of great works by the artist to appear at auction in recent decades. The estimate is $30-50 million.
It was painted in July of 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, the town where he settled on his release from the asylum at St. Remy that May. It was in a number of private collections in Germany before making its way to New York to become one of the earliest works by the artist to enter the United States. It was sold by the Knoedler Gallery in 1928 to A. Conger Goodyear, one of the principal founders of the Museum of Modern Art.
Still Life will be on view at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre from October 2-5 and in Sotheby’s London galleries from October 12-18, before returning to New York for exhibition in Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries beginning October 31.