$50 painting found at garage sale questionably hailed as long-lost van Gogh

Van Gogh...ever heard of him? Cut off his own ear, painted a self-portrait with a bandage wrapped around his head, one of the most well-known painting masters of all time. Ring a bell?

He was born and lived in the late 1800s. Starry Night, arguably his most famous work and one of the most famous paintings of all time, was completed in 1889, just one year before he died. And though Van Gogh was incredibly prolific, creating well over 1,000 known works, there's something tragic about his art being finite. There will never be another van Gogh, and he will never have the opportunity to put brush to canvas again and give us more of his incredible work to admire, discuss, and debate.

Or...will he?

A painting discovered at a Minnesota garage sale and purchased for less than $50, is dividing the art community. The new owners are convinced it's an original, long lost van Gogh.

  Are there still undiscovered van Goghs out there?  Giphy  

An undisclosed buyer snagged the painting from the garage sale—imagine that!—several years ago and found similarities to the styles of Vincent van Gogh. The painting appears to show a fisherman standing by the sea with the letters "ELIMAR" scrawled in the corner. This person submitted a claim with the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2019, considered the absolute authority on the artist, which was quickly denied.

But the story didn't end there. The original buyer sold the painting of the fisherman to a New York company called LMI Group, who were convinced they had an authentic van Gogh on their hands. They set out to prove it with no expense spared.

After years of meticulous research and scientific evaluation, LMI Group released a more-than-400-page report outlining all the findings. In the estimation of their experts, Elimar was without a doubt, painted by van Gogh. Here's why:

• An egg-white finish was found on the painting, a technique van Gogh was known to use in order to preserve his works when rolling the canvasses.
• They believe "Elimar" is the name of the painting, and handwriting analysis matches the lettering to other samples from Van Gogh. "A precise mathematical comparison of the letters 'E L I M A R' to the block and free-form letters found in other autograph works by van Gogh, yielded significant similarities in the letters’ characteristics, including stroke length, counter, angle, stroke width, and bounding size," the press release reads.
• The framing and pose of the subject mirrors van Gogh's later self-portraits.
• The materials used are confirmed to match the time period in which van Gogh was actively painting.
• Perhaps most fascinatingly, embedded right there into the painting was a human hair. "Methodical DNA analysis verified that the hair belonged to a human male, with the investigating scientists observing that the hair appeared to be red in color," according to the report.

If Elimar were truly a van Gogh, it would make the piece potentially worth over $15 million.

  The painting, "Elimar", was found at a garage sale in Minnesota several years ago.LMI Group

For all the rigorous scientific evidence outlined in the report, the art community collectively disagrees: They say there's no way the Elimar piece was done by van Gogh.

The Van Gogh Museum even officially rejected the attribution recently, casting massive doubts on the attribution to the Dutch master.

But how can people be so dismissive of all the rigorous evidence, all the forensics, materials dating, and even DNA analysis of the hair?! Easy: Elimar just doesn't look or feel right.

Lindsey Bourret, director of Signature Art Authentication put it perfectly: “One of the defining features of van Gogh’s paintings is the precision within his expressive brushwork—his strokes may be bold, but they are purposeful, creating movement and depth that feel both instinctive and masterful. Elimar, by contrast, lacks that balance...While scientific analysis can date materials, it cannot account for an artist’s touch—and in this case, the stylistic weaknesses strongly suggest that this is not a van Gogh.”

There's also common sense at play. Van Gogh was not typically known to sign most of his paintings or write titles on them. So writing "ELIMAR" in the corner would be very out of character for him to do. Far more likely, experts say, is that the painting belongs to Danish painter Henning Elimar. When you see another example of Henning Elimar's work, well, the case is pretty damning.

I think there's a part of all of us that really wants Elimar to be a van Gogh. How amazing is it to think that we could still discover new work by one of the greatest artists of all time?

What if there were new inventions and drawings from Leonardo da Vinci still out there, waiting for us to find them? Or a previously unread play written by William Shakespeare?

Sadly, there's a lot of money at stake in potential discoveries like this. Van Gogh is one of the most frequently forged artists because, if you were to convince the world that you had a van Gogh, it would be worth millions of dollars. Though Elimar is not a case of outright forgery, it's certainly possible that the potential riches and excitement have made experts squint a little too hard to try to make the case.

That's not to say Elimar still doesn't have its believers. Susan Brantly, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, helped work on the LMI report and remains convinced. “The first time you look at it, you could say: ‘What? That’s not a Van Gogh. Everybody knows what a Van Gogh looks like,’” Brantly said. But deep research of van Gogh's letters, life, and artistic style convinced her otherwise.

Elimar aside, new works by van Gogh and other masters are out there. In 2013, a painting called Sunset at Montmajour was authenticated. Before that, a new one was added to the collection in 1928. These events are rare and should be highly appreciated. In the meantime, it's OK to continue holding out hope for the next big discovery.