Van Gogh Museum Acquires Rare Virginie Demont-Breton Painting

The Van Gogh Museum has acquired 'L'homme est en mer' by Virginie Demont-Breton, a rare addition by a female artist that significantly influenced Vincent van Gogh’s own artistic style.

” Van Gogh had seen Demont-Breton’s painting, which was made in between 1887 and 1889, recreated in black and white in a publication concerning French hair salon paints and he was so influenced by it that he replicated it,” according to Artnet. “It is among the only paintings by a female musician that he is recognized to have emulated.”

A Significant New Addition to the Collection

At TEFAF Maastricht, the Van Gogh Museum obtained Virginie Demont-Breton’s L’homme est en mer, a painting from 1887– 88 that now counts as only the third painting by a woman in the institution’s collection, according to Artnet Information.

Demont-Breton’s L’homme est en mer formerly sold at Christie’s in 2000 for a price of $99,500. In an essay accompanying the lot at the time, Christie’s wrote, “While her subject varied from religious make-ups, genre scenes and landscapes, she had a certain fondness for her wholehearted representations of family life.”

Investment and Artistic Legacy

As reported by senior editor Kate Brown, the paint of a female looking longingly while holding a baby– probably craving the titular man mixed-up– was purchased by the Amsterdam gallery with public funds devoted to procurements for a price in between EUR500,000 and EUR1 million ($ 543,000 and $1.1 million). The sale on TEFAF’s opening day was agented by Gallery 19C from Dallas-Forth Worth, where the work had actually been in a private collection for twenty years.

Regarding the job, Lisa Smit, the Van Gogh Gallery’s manager of paintings, said, “Van Gogh was a big follower of the work of Demont-Breton’s father, Jules Breton. He would have seen a lot of belief in this job. It is wholehearted, it is truthful. You can immediately really feel for the figure. It is a depiction of motherhood that is not picturesque.”