Provenance Research into Paintings and Drawings by Van Gogh’s Contemporaries

Contemporaries collection

In addition to the world’s largest Van Gogh collection, the Van Gogh Museum also holds a leading collection of works by other 19th-century and early 20th-century artists.

This Contemporaries collection consists of some 300 paintings, 750 drawings, almost 6,000 prints and approximately 50 sculptures. The Van Gogh Museum is currently conducting further research into the sub-collections and improving access to them. An important part of this research involves reconstructing and publishing the provenance of these works.

Vincent and Theo van Gogh laid the foundations for the Contemporaries collection. Over the years, the brothers collected progressive late 19th-century art. Like the majority of the works by Vincent himself, the brothers’ collection was still in the family’s possession, and has been at the museum since it opened in 1973.

Provenance research 1933-1945

Since then, many works have been added to the Collection of Contemporaries through acquisitions and gifts, and the collection continues to grow.

Most of these works have gaps in the provenance and some of these gaps overlap with the years of the National Socialist regime and World War II. In 2020, provenance research into these works was therefore started, focusing on the period 1933-1945. The aim of this project is to either rule out or shed light on cases of theft, confiscation or other forms of involuntary expropriation.

Starting in 1933 in Nazi Germany, various groups were persecuted and their property confiscated. This resulted in large-scale art theft before and during World War II. Artworks, primarily those owned by Jews, were stolen or confiscated, or the owners were forced to sell the works.

The Van Gogh Museum is also home to several works with known links to the war. One such example is The Forest of Fontainebleau: Gorges d'Apremont by Théodore Rousseau (c. 1848). This painting was part of the collection of David David-Weill, and was confiscated by the Nazis on 11 August 1941 at Château de Sourches in France.

The work was discovered in Germany after the war by the so-called Monuments Men and repatriated to France, where it was subsequently returned to the rightful owners. The work passed hands several times over the course of the subsequent decades, before ultimately being acquired by the Van Gogh Museum in 1994.

Looted art on the art market

However, many stolen works were never returned, and eventually appeared on the art market. The art therefore found its way into private and public collections, also of museums.

It wasn’t until late into the 20th century that there was international recognition of the importance of identifying the stolen works – that were now scattered around the world – and returning them to their rightful owners or their heirs.

To this end, in 1998, the Netherlands and 44 other countries signed the so-called Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. Since then, a great deal of research is being conducted into looted art in museum collections, both in the Netherlands and abroad.

The new (digital) research methods that have become available in the past decade now give the research new impetus. Using the expertise and facilities now available, the Van Gogh Museum is therefore dedicated to comprehensively researching the provenance in the period 1933-1945 of the many additions to the collection since the museum opened in 1973.

More information on the progress and results of this research will be published on the website in due course.