Christie’s
An 1888 Vincent van Gogh painting will be offered at Christie’s in a 20th century art auction in New York on May 13. Titled Le Pont de Trinquetaille (1888), the work is estimated to sell for $25 million–$35 million.
Measuring at 25 inches by 31 inches, the painting was made a year before his suicide at the age of 37 in 1890. It is one of the few landscapes from his coveted Arles period, and it offers a street scene showing the Trinquetaille bridge rendered using the artist’s signature expressive brushwork and warm color palette.
After the artist’s death, the work passed into the hands of the widow of van Gogh’s brother Theo. When last seen at a Christie’s auction in New York in November 2004, Le Pont de Trinquetaille sold for $11.2 million, below its estimate of $12 million. Before that, it sold at Christie’s for $15.4 million in November 1999. It was last exhibited in 2016 at Oslo’s Munch Museum, in a show focused on van Gogh and Edvard Munch that also traveled to the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
“Works of this scale and importance are incredibly rare and everything about it, from the vibrant, ‘absinthe’ color of the sky and the highly structured composition to the thick and expressive brushwork of the water speaks of an artist at the very height of his creative powers,” said Christie’s senior international director of Impressionist and modern art, Jay Vincze, in a statement.
Le Pont de Trinquetaille is not the only major van Gogh work to come up for sale as of late. In March, another painting by van Gogh, 1887’s Scène de rue à Montmartre, sold at Sotheby’s during an Impressionist and modern art auction in Paris for $15.3 million, against a high estimate of $9.7 million. Prior to that, it had been held in a private collection for over a century. In a Christie’s sale that month, a portrait titled La Mousmé (1888) in New York in March for £7.5 million ($10.4 million) with fees, against an estimate of $7 million.
