Crossroads Roundup: Possible Van Gogh Found, the Home of the Last Anglo-Saxon King of England, and Gustav Klimt
The latest news in art, archaeology, culture, and more.
It’s been a month since my last Roundup, and the beginning of the year has certainly been busy:
A real Van Gogh found at a garage sale? LMI Group International says yes. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam says no.
Some of you may recall the drama over Salvator Mundi, a painting that was authenticated as an original work by Leonardo da Vinci, despite objections from some experts. A similar case made headlines this month involving a painting that might be by Vincent van Gogh.
In 2019, LMI Group International acquired the above painting from an anonymous antiques dealer, who bought the art at a garage sale in Minnesota for $50. LMI assembled a massive team of experts to authenticate what they believed to be a Van Gogh, and the result is a 456-page report that you can read here. At the time, the Van Gogh Museum quickly responded that they disagreed with the report’s findings. LMI Group’s chairman, president, and CEO Lawrence M. Shindell wrote to the museum, “We are … puzzled why the Van Gogh Museum invested less than 24 hours to summarily reject the facts and evidence presented in the 456-page report without offering any meaningful explanations.”
The painting includes a signature at the bottom-right corner with the name “Elimar,” from which LMI has derived its title (more on that below). Researchers dated Elimar to 1889, one year before Van Gogh’s death, when the artist would have been living in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric sanitarium in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. The report also takes care to mention that the authenticators had no financial stake in the artwork: “Each has been compensated at that person’s customary rate of compensation for that person’s professional services.”
However, this past week, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has once again publicly denied the attribution, and other art experts are now joining the institution to share their doubts. Wouter van der Veen, a Van Gogh scholar and a former employee of the Van Gogh Museum, told ARTnews that “the painting technique and the choice of colors are very different from van Gogh’s… The lines, the strokes, the impasto, everything is very different.” It is Van der Veen’s belief that the painting is actually by a little-known 20th-century Danish artist named Henning Elimar.
LMI has swiftly hit back against these arguments: it stated that no one from the Van Gogh Museum has seen the painting in person, and Elimar’s collective works lack “any similarities in style, technique, subject matter, or epoch.” Likewise, LMI “did not identify any evidence of twentieth-century materials” used to create the painting. They argue that the name “Elimar” is a reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s 1848 novel The Two Baronesses. (Van Gogh was a prolific reader, and he loved Andersen’s work.)
I’ll admit that to my eyes, Elimar doesn’t look like the other works Vincent van Gogh created in the final year of his life, but what do you all think? I’m certainly curious to see how the case will be resolved. If you’re interested, you can read George Nelson’s excellent reporting on the unfolding dispute here.
Archaeologists claim to have found the long-lost residence of Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king to rule England. The key to this discovery? A latrine.
Harold Godwinson, better known as Harold II, ruled England for less than a year. He was crowned in January of 1066 and died that October in the Battle of Hastings, the decisive victory of the Norman Conquest. His residence was unknown to historians for centuries, though a depiction survived in Scene 33 of the Bayeux Tapestry (below).
The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the events that led to the Norman Conquest of England, and it is believed to have been created within a few years of the Battle of Hastings—possibly as a gift for William the Conqueror. Scene 33, on the right side of the above image, shows King Harold II in his residence in England.
The Tapestry also showcases Harold feasting in a hall and attending church in Bosham, a village in West Sussex (above). This January, a study in The Antiquaries Journal argues that Harold’s residence indeed lied in Bosham.
Notice that I’m using the word “residence” rather than “castle”—the Anglo-Saxons didn’t build castles in England, and sadly, their structures have largely been lost to time (partly as a result of the Norman Conquest itself; castles became the dominant aristocratic dwelling after the Normans took over). The study notes:
Indeed, the first occurrence of the word ‘castle’ in an English context, found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1051, points towards this very distinction: ‘þa welisce menn gewroht ænne castel on Herefordscire’ (‘then [that year] the foreigners built a castle in Herefordshire’). It is significant that the chronicler did not choose an English word to describe the feature, and the sense of an alien imposition is amplified by reference to the ‘foreign men’ behind its construction: whatever this castel was, the chronicler wanted to stress that it was intrusive and ‘other’.
Given all this, how did the archaeologists narrow down a potential location?
Back in 2006, a latrine (a primitive toilet) that had once been attached to a pre-Norman timber house was discovered in Bosham. Starting in the 10th century, latrines could be found in aristocratic dwellings in England; its presence on the site indicated that this was the home of a powerful noble. For this most recent study, the team conducted geophysical surveys that resulted in the discovery of two other medieval structures.
Dr. Duncan Wright, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at Newcastle University and lead author of the study, said in a statement:
The realisation that the 2006 excavations had found, in effect, an Anglo-Saxon en-suite confirmed to us that this house sits on the site of an elite residence pre-dating the Norman Conquest. Looking at this vital clue, alongside all our other evidence, it is beyond all reasonable doubt that we have here the location of Harold Godwinson’s private power centre, the one famously depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.
“Gustav Klimt - Painting the Land”
Every Roundup, I feature the work of another Substack writer that caught my eye. This week, I wanted to share an essay from Art Every Day about Gustav Klimt’s landscapes, written by
. George’s newsletter is a wonderful resource both for the more seasoned art lovers and those who are new to the subject.
I particularly enjoyed this week’s piece on Gustav Klimt, which turns the focus to the artist’s landscapes as a way of better understanding him as a person:
Many of these Landscape paintings date from the last few years of Klimt’s life (he passed away in 1918, aged only 55) - and are mostly set around one of his favourite holiday destinations by Lake Atler in Austria.
But far from being just a side practice, or an afterthought when we think of his wider career - I think these works offer us the best possible insight into Klimt’s uniquely magical way of seeing the world.
Yesterday (February 6th) was the anniversary of Klimt’s death, so I felt this was a fitting essay to profile. To discover more of Klimt’s glorious landscapes, you can find George’s full article here.
A few more stories that caught my eye…
Who gets to claim ownership of artifacts discovered underwater—especially when a particular shipwreck is caught up in the history of colonization? Samuel Reilly of Artnet has written a fascinating essay about the case of a Spanish galleon off the coast of Columbia, and the various factions who have claimed a right to ownership of its riches (17 billion dollars worth of gold, silver, and emeralds).
Archaeologists conducting excavations at the Chupacigarro archaeological site in Peru have discovered a previously unknown pyramid.
Two Dutch metal detectorists found a hoard of over 400 Roman-era coins in Bunnik (southeast of Amsterdam). The coins include portraits of Roman, British, and African rulers from 200 B.C. to 47 A.D.
A dig at Deir el-Bahari in Luxor, Egypt has resulted in the discovery of architectural elements that were once part of the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut.
An ongoing controversy surrounding the restoration of Notre-Dame: the Sites & Monuments organization in France has sued to block the replacement of several 19th-century stained glass windows with works by contemporary artists. The plan backed by President Macron has proven extremely controversial, as the windows in question weren’t damaged in the 2019 fire.
Beneath a 1570 oil painting by Renaissance master Titian, researchers have discovered a hidden portrait.
And finally, a very stealthy shrew.
This is a bit outside the usual subject matter of the Crossroads Roundup, but I found it too delightful not to share. A group of young researchers (two of the three are still university students) have captured the very first photographs of the Mount Lyell Shrew, the only known mammal in California that had previously never been photographed.
Harper Forbes, Prakrit Jain, and Vishal Subramanyan went on a three-day expedition in the Sierra Nevada to document the shrew in its native habitat. They were able to capture their first photographs within two hours of their arrival. As Subramanyan told CNN, “It just shows that it’s generally an underappreciated species in an underappreciated ecosystem, that people haven’t spent the time and been able to actually bring dedicated focus to the shrews.”
I find the whole thing ridiculous, and proof that science will never take the place of actual connoisseurship. Van Gogh went out and painted Starry Night in 1889, and then came home and spent some time copying a mediocre painting by a little-known artist? It’s completely illogical. If they were claiming that the painting was an art school study, or an early work it would be one thing. Still unlikely, but possible. I’m still unsure who looked at that painting in the first place and thought - hey! That might be a Van Gogh!
Thank you for the feature here, Nicole. And as always, loving your choices on the other news too.
I must admit, my opinion on the van Gogh piece is that there's more chance of the sun rising in the west and setting in the east than for that to be an authentic piece by his hand!
From the colour scheme, to the application of paint, to the way the face is painted, and so much more . . . the whole thing just seems too far off, even compared to any of van Gogh's other studies or experiments over the years.
But with that said, I'm sure the LMI group will not let the matter rest without a fight. So will still be very interested to see where the story goes next.