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Rare van Gogh on show in Amsterdam
A little known work by art genius Vincent van Gogh goes on display for the first time at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The vignette "A Loving Couple" has been in private hands for decades and not seen by the general public.
The work was most recently sold at auction at Sotheby's in 2001. It shows a man and woman walking on a path next to a canal, leaning together, her arm over his shoulder. It was painted in March 1888, when van Gogh was near the height of his artistic powers and two years before his suicide.
The small piece is all that remains of a larger canvas that van Gogh discarded as a flop. He cut it out of the original canvas and kept it. The work is part of an exhibition on Van Gogh's friendship with French painter Emile Bernard who was sent a sketch of the painting.
For the exhibition, a reproduction of the sketch, owned by New York's Morgan Museum, is displayed alongside the painting.
The painter later did several more full canvases portraying the same bridge outside Arles, France, from different perspectives, and one of these that closely matches the lost "Loving Couple" canvas is displayed on the other side of the painting for comparison. The exhibition runs until the end of January 2008.
This article was written for TravelSavvy Europe by Amy Armitage. If you know of an interesting European travel related news story, please get in contact.
