A Previously Unseen Van Gogh Drawing Goes on Display

Image: Van Gogh Museum

Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum has added a recently discovered piece of artwork to the catalogue of the artist. The piece depicts a man hunched over in apparent exhaustion. 

The announcement of the new discovery came via a press conference held by the museum. Titled, “Study for Worn Out”, the piece is allegedly an earlier take on the same subject for the highly regarded Van Gogh artwork called “Worn Out“. 

“Study for Worn Out” is been signed off with a simple “Vincent” and depicts an elderly labourer dressed in a waistcoat, trousers, and boots sitting on a wooden chair with his head in his hands.

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The sketch was made early in Van Gogh’s career in 1882, when he was 29-years-old, two years into his career as an artist. The Van Gogh Museum has verified the authenticity of the sketch. The drawing had been sitting in a Dutch family’s private collection for about a century.

The final version of Worn Out. Image: Van Gogh Museum

“This one has never been seen before anywhere. It’s the first time that this drawing is out in the open,” said Teio Meedendorp, senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum. Experts have dated the drawing to approximately the end of November 1882, around the time when Van Gogh was living at the Hague.

He used a thick carpenter’s pencil and made the sketch on coarse watercolour paper. Van Gogh finished the drawing by rubbing pellets of bread on the lighter parts of the subject’s clothes, and then coated the drawing with a fixative made from milk and water. The entire sheet measures 48.8 cm by 30 cm. 

The sketch is now on view alongside “Worn Out” at the Van Gogh Museum until January 2 where it will return to the private collection. 

This Van Gogh piece isn’t the only jaw-dropping discovery made in recent times. Just a week ago, not too far away from the Netherlands, a man in the Danish countryside uncovered a stash of 1,500-year-old gold with a metal detector. The trove includes coins and medallions from the Roman Empire.

The world’s third-largest diamond was also discovered in a mine in Botswana in June earlier this year. The gemstone was unearthed as a joint venture between Debswana Diamond Company and Anglo American’s De Beer.

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