Sotheby’s Hong Kong announced that it will auction painting by Vincent Van Gogh on October 9. It is the first time a Van Gogh painting is is being auctioned in the Far East by one of the West’s major auction houses. The painting titled Still life: Vase with Gladioli (Nature Morte: Vase aux Glaïeuls) (August-September 1886) is expected to fetch a price of HK$70m-HK$100m ($9m-$12.8m).
The painting shows the bright red gladioli towering above the small pot, which sits on a dark table that blends into the background. They usually blooms in August and September in northern France. Still life: Vase with Gladioli is a good example of the artist’s style at this time, a few months after his arrival in Paris in February 1886. The fact that it is signed may mean that Vincent gave it to one of his artist friends.
Vincent’s brother Theo reported to their mother in July: “He is mainly painting flowers—with the object to put a more lively colour into his next set of pictures… He also has acquaintances who give him a bunch of flowers every week.”
Writing in English to his artist friend Horace Livens, Vincent reported in September/October 1886: “I have made a series of colour studies in painting simply flowers… Trying to render intense COLOUR and not a grey harmony.” At this time he made several other still lifes with gladioli, including Vase with Gladioli and Chinese Asters (August-September 1886), now in the Van Gogh Museum collection.
The painting to be auctioned in Hong Kong was painted over an earlier still life—one of potatoes and a bowl. This original composition probably dates from a year earlier, September 1885, when Van Gogh was living in his parents’ village of Nuenen, in the southern Netherlands. Always being short of money, he probably simply reused the canvas after his arrival in Paris. The Sotheby’s catalogue entry also suggests that he overpainted the earlier work because he “felt his art moving in a new and exciting direction”.
According to provenance, the first owner of the painting was the Parisian critic and supporter of Impressionism, Théodore Duret, who owned it by 1912. By 1928 it was with Alden Brooks, a US writer who was living in Paris and became best known for arguing that Shakespeare was not the dramatist of the plays ascribed to him.
In 1983 the still life sold for $150,000, going to the Florida-based collector Elwin Litchfield Phillips Jr. When his estate sold the picture in 1999 it fetched $1,762,000—a price increase of nearly 12 times. Two years later it came up for sale again, estimated at $1.2m-$1.6m, significantly less than the previous time—but it failed to sell.
In November 2016 the US owner successfully sold the still life for a hammer price of $5,862,500. When it comes up in Hong Kong on 9 October, the estimate of $9m-$12.8m is roughly double what it achieved five years ago. This rise is partly because Far Eastern demand is pushing up prices for Van Gogh works.
Another still life, Poppies and Daisies (June 1890), sold at Sotheby’s in 2014 for nearly $62m. This work had been painted in Auvers-sur-Oise a month before Vincent’s death, when he was at the height of his powers. The buyer was the billionaire Wang Zhongjun, the owner of a Beijing entertainment company and himself an amateur artist. No doubt Sotheby’s was partly influenced by this successful sale in setting the estimate for Still life: Vase with Gladioli.