The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam rejected the attribution request for a portrait, despite evidence given by the LMI Group.
Titled Elimar (1889), the painting was purchased by the New York-based LMI Group International in 2019 at a Minnesota garage sale for an unknown sum. The painting depicted a fisherman fixing his fishing net near the shore. The LMI Group assembled a team of 20 experts, including chemists, art curators, and patent lawyers, to check the veracity of the work. It is estimated that the group spent $30,000 on the research work.
The LMI Group submitted the 458-page report supporting the provenance of the painting to the Van Gogh Museum, an institute that is an authority in the works of the late master. However, on Friday, the museum rejected the attribution request, concluding that the painting was not by Vincent van Gogh.
The LMI Group was obviously not happy with the decision, saying it was “puzzled why the Van Gogh Museum invested less than one working day to summarily reject the facts presented […] without offering any explanation, let alone studying the painting directly rather than looking at it reproduced as a JPEG.” However, the museum is notorious for being stringent with attribution requests. It receives about 200 attribution requests annually and rejects 99 percent of them upon submission. In recent years, the museum added an unofficial policy of only considering requests that were already supported by other museums or galleries; the LMI Group counts as neither.
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While not stated, there are certain reasons why the museum might have rejected the request. The scribbled “Elimar” was claimed to be the name of the subject by the LMI Group, but it might as well have been the name of the artist. There is also the fact that when the portrait was supposedly created, Vincent van Gogh had checked himself into a mental sanitorium and remained there for a year.
