Museum exhibits disputed Van Goghs

Forty pictures reputed to be "lost" Van Goghs are to go on public display in an exhibition that will throw open one of the longest-running and most acrimonious controversies in the art world.

A museum in the Dutch town of Breda will unveil chalk drawings, sketches and paintings their owners believe were among hundreds of pictures abandoned by the artist when he left his family home five years before his death.

The exhibition's launch coincides with the publication of a two-year study by the museum into their provenance. It is expected to raise the probability that a large number are, indeed, authentic.

The findings will be fiercely contested by the artist's family and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, both of which consistently refuse to countenance the idea that a large number of works presumed destroyed or lost still exist in private hands.

Art historians broadly agree that Van Gogh gave hundreds of his early works to his mother for safekeeping. However, opinion is fiercely divided over what happened to them after this. Though there is wide disagreement about the present whereabouts of the pictures jettisoned by Van Gogh, certain facts about their dispersal are beyond dispute.

Four months after Van Gogh left his family home, his recently widowed mother is known to have moved to nearby Breda. Her son's pictures were subsequently taken into storage by a family friend, Adrianus Schrauwen. By the time the Van Goghs tried to reclaim them in 1902, Schrauwen had already given them away to a second-hand goods merchant.

Of the hundreds of drawings the merchant acquired, he discarded many, while selling much of the canvas to a local rag shop. However, even at this stage, he is widely believed to have been left with about 150 loose canvases, 60 paintings on stretchers, 80 pen-and-ink drawings and 150 chalk drawings.

Many of the paintings were eventually sold in dribs and drabs, along with the various drawings, for next to nothing.

However, it is only the final batch whose fate can be traced with any confidence. A Breda tailor, Kees Mouwen, bought several hundred works from the merchant - just as, posthumously, the name Van Gogh was starting to mean something.

Between 1904 and 1936, Mouwen sold much of his collection through galleries and auction houses in Rotterdam, The Hague, Brussels and Amsterdam. Though most are now recognised as Van Goghs even by his own estate, a further 200 or more pictures sold by Mouwen at fleamarkets vanished without trace.

The 40 images to be unveiled by Breda Museum this week are believed by their owners to represent a fraction of the Van Goghs that have hitherto been missing. It will take more than an academic report, however, to convince the Van Gogh Museum that so many of the dispersed pictures have survived. A spokeswoman said: "Our collection department has looked at this and they do not think these are Van Goghs. But we are independent from the Breda Museum, and if they say they think they are, that's up to them."

- INDEPENDENT