The One Painting van Gogh Is Known to Have Sold During His Life

Vincent van Gogh "The Red Vineyard," from 1888

Vincent van Gogh, “The Red Vineyard,” 1888. (Public domain)

In 2024, an 1887 painting by Vincent van Gogh snagged one of the year’s highest prices at auction, clocking in at $33.19 million. At Christie’s New York, in 2022, Orchard with Cypresses sold for an astounding $117 million, making it one of the 15 most expensive artworks ever sold at auction. Throughout the past century, the post-Impressionist master has achieved a meteoric rise to fame as a blue-chip artist, but when he was alive, he wasn’t nearly as lucky.

By the time he died in 1890, at the age of 37, van Gogh had produced about 2,100 artworks, and yet he’s known to have sold only one of them during his lifetime: The Red Vineyard. As its title suggests, the painting depicts a vineyard doused in a dramatic color palette, with reds, oranges, and yellows exploding across the canvas. He’d discovered the scene in Arles during an afternoon walk with fellow artist Paul Gauguin on October 28, 1888, describing what he saw in a letter to his brother, Theo, as “completely red like red wine.”

“In the distance it became yellow, and then a green sky with a sun, fields violet and sparkling yellow here and there after the rain in which the setting sun was reflected,” van Gogh added in his note.

Rather than painting en plein air, van Gogh returned to his studio and recreated the vineyard from memory, layering the landscape with his thick brushstrokes and expressive forms. In the sky is an enormous sun, its rays beaming down upon the fiery earth, and the turquoise river snaking through the composition’s right side. With his confident hand, the painting radiates the essence of fall, serving as one of his more saturated canvases.

Once The Red Vineyard was completed, the artist sent it to Theo in Paris, who described it as “very beautiful” and hung it up in his apartment. After a few months, van Gogh received an invitation to participate in the 1890 Les XX exhibition in Brussels, where he decided to showcase the 1888 painting and subsequently asked his brother to send it back for the occasion. There, he sold it for 400 francs to Belgian painter and collector Anna Boch, the wife of Eugène Boch, another Impressionist painter and friend of van Gogh. In a letter to Theo, van Gogh later confessed that he felt embarrassed about having sold Boch the painting at sticker price, when she should’ve received a friend’s discount.

The story of The Red Vineyard doesn’t end with the Boch family. In 1909, the painting was bought by Ivan Morosov, a Moscow collector and textile factory owner, at the price of 30,000 francs. A year after the Russian Revolution, in 1918, Morosov’s collection was nationalized by the Bolsheviks and eventually transferred to Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in 1948. Since then, The Red Vineyard has been exhibited globally, including in 2022 at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Although van Gogh began receiving critical attention during the last year of his life, he didn’t live to witness the intensity of his eventual commercial success. Still, Anna Boch—and van Gogh’s sister-in-law—must’ve had a hunch about his genius, even before his death.