The Only Person Who Bought A Van Gogh Work When He Was Alive
Theo van Rysselberghe’s Anna Boch in Her Studio (1893). Image via Wikiart (public domain)
Over a century before galleries received the high-tech “Van Gogh” treatment and enthralled the mainstream, there was one woman who appreciated the Dutch Post-Impressionist’s genius for what it truly was.
It’s an open secret that the artist only sold one painting in his lifetime, and the buyer with great foresight was none other than Anna Boch, a rather progressive Belgian painter. As detailed by Vincent Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey in the Art Newspaper, Boch will have her own retrospective at the Mu.ZEE modern art museum in Ostend to mark her 175th birthday.
In one of the pieces on show, Boch painted her acquired Peach Trees in Blossom into a portrait of her lounge wall. The work, Interior (1892), is the first recorded image of a Van Gogh painting in a collector’s home after his death in 1890, and is an obvious testament to Boch’s admiration of his art.
Peach Trees in Blossom was purchased shortly after Van Gogh’s passing, in July 1891. But a little over a year before, Boch had obtained another masterpiece from Van Gogh, named The Red Vineyard (1888).
Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard (1888), the only artwork he sold in his lifetime. Image via Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
The Red Vineyard is regarded as the only picture that Van Gogh sold when he was alive. “It will look good in a corner of the living room,” Boch wrote to her brother Eugène, as quoted by Bailey, just five months before the tortured painter’s demise.
Peach Trees in Blossom, 1889 #vangogh #vincentvangogh https://t.co/LOcAjjCtxP pic.twitter.com/E0X54mS7D7
— Vincent van Gogh (@vangoghartist) December 15, 2022
Boch sold away both Van Gogh paintings in 1907 for a purported 10,000 francs, 13 times what she purchased them for. Accordingly, she paid 350 francs (£14) for Peach Trees in Blossom.
Unfortunately, these two landscapes haven’t made it for the dedicated Boch exhibition as they were unavailable for loan. Peach Trees in Blossom, for one, belongs to the Courtauld Gallery in London, which has already promised to lend it to another art show. Meanwhile, The Red Vineyard resides in Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and cannot be borrowed due to transportation issues amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
All told, one Van Gogh painting sits in the exhibit, and that’s a portrait of Boch’s brother Eugène by the Dutch painter. The two men became friends while working in Arles.
Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Eugène Boch (1888). Image via Musée d’Orsay / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In total, the Anna Boch, an Impressionist Journey retrospective will showcase 96 of her works, in addition to art by Van Gogh, Paul Signac, Paul Gauguin, and other contemporaries that she’d collected.
Boch was a modern woman who owned a car and traveled often—and alone too, on numerous occasions.
On top of that, she was the only female member of the exclusive artistic group, Les XX, whose members also included Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. Her illustrious life, along with her courage to break the glass ceiling for women, is worth celebrating.
The exhibition, which kicked off on July 1, will run through November 5, before heading to the Musée de Pont-Aven in France in February 2024.
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[via The Art Newspaper and Mu.ZEE, images via various sources]
