" Probably the signature is not put with oil paint neither ".
A complete wrong observation. The paint of the signature is oilpaint. That is for sure, but diluted with a thinner, to make it less disturbing
for the eye of the public and a procedure used more often by Vincent to sign. The fact that the signature is put with a diluted paint does not mean that the signature is false but means that the painter had a purpose in doing so. Also this fact shows the incapicity of Van Gelder as an expert of paintings and shows his weakness in observing paintings in general.
So lets finish with this horrible and completely insufficient and incorrect report of Van Gelder and lets go on and see in the next contributions how his pupil Louis van Tilborgh is serving the family Ras in 2000 / 2001 with his expertise build on the horrific Van Gelder -report.
From knowledge of knowledgeable Vincent-experts in the society ( until the end of World War II )to the knowledge of Vincent van Gogh by museumpeople ( until now) :
In the person of Louis van Tilborgh( since 1973) we find the person mainly responsible for the ongoing and more and more rotten decadence of the objective, neutral and valuefree expertise of the work of Vincent van Gogh. In fact already beginning with the abdication and death of J.B.De la Faille (1959) as the important Vincent-expert.
Van Tilborgh continued with the bad habits and unscientific and voluntaristic observations his teacher at the university Van Gelder introduced in the Vincent-expertise as shown in the critical analysis of the professor above. Also began after the second world war the first intermingling of the museumworld with the Vincent-expertise.
Therefore the critical analysis of his negative report is an illustrative example of this sad evolution from honest and human people who did their best to give a good and careful expertise of the work of Vincent , though of course exactly why they are just human not without mistakes, like for example J.B.de la Faille and others, to the situation we have now. A small group of museumpeople, completely inapt to make an objective and scientific expertise of the new and unknown works of Vincent van Gogh appearing on the free artmarket, but supported by the university, arthistory , uncritical big auctionhouses and the incompetent and stupid massmedia , gets more and more power and stands above society and also above the necesessity to legitimate this power and their incompetent and even unscientific expertises of the great work of Vincent van Gogh.
LOUIS VAN TILBORGH : THE HORRIBLE PAIN IN THE ASS OF CITIZENS FINDING NEW OR UNKNOWN PAINTINGS OF VINCENT:
Before I will comment the poor and completely unscientific negative report of Van Tilborgh about the Glaneuse , I think it is important to refer here ,as a support for my negative opinion about this horrible creature, to the fact that I discovered that an English gentleman, called Malcolm Head,recently ( 9 december 2011) came in the news in England.
Mr. Head contacted me some years ago with the complaint that he had a still life of Vincent and that he had tried more then ten years ago to interest the Van Gogh Museum for this particular painting , but all he got as a reaction was a cold inhuman "expertise " of one line, based on the socalled "carefull study of the photo"-method of the painting, the same insane and unscientific method Van Tilborgh used to burn my painting of the portrait of the Man with the hat, worth at least 10 million Euro, in the opinion of Benoit Lamndais. Mr. Head speaks now of a value of 6 Million Euro for his still life and he is in a late stage of the process of researching the painting by Institutes in England. I will here join the picture of the work.
THE POOR REPORT OF VAN TILBORGH ABOUT F-23 the Glaneuse(Gleaning Woman) from 17 november 2000 ,
made for the heirs of Mrs.Ras-Lundbye :
VAN GOGH MUSEUM 17 november 2000
Refering to the conditions as put in the contract of 17 november 2000 and in my letter from 20 Oktober 2000 can I tell you wnhat follows here.
We have studied the material you sent us carefully and looked at the work. We have the opinion that the painting Gleaning Woman (34,8 cm x 32,3 cm,F-23) cannot be attributed to Vincent van Gogh. Our opinion is the same as the one of the Expertise Institute in 1958 and of the edition of the Oeuvrecatalog of De La Faille from 1970, where the work has been shown (588).under the header "Rejected works". The signature does not equal exactly the one of van Gogh, the colour-scheme is different, as the brushstroke,while the landscape, we see hills" ,is not compatible with The Hague,Brabant or Drenthe.
Would you be so kind to recollect the work ? We should like to hear when you can come ? You can contact our Office Registration during officehours, with my secretary Mrs.Hoofwijk.
I am sorry to be obliged to disappoint you.
With kind greetings,
Louis van Tilborgh, Conservator paintings.
For the objective but critical analysis of this report of Van Tilborgh I will use the next contribution and I thank the reader who continues following this in my opinion very important contribution to the
science of Vincent van Gogh .
DOUBLE DUTCH : THE HUMBUG OF LOUIS VAN TILBORGH,
CONSERVATOR AND HEAD RESEARCHER OF THE VAN GOGH MUSEUM:
An objective but critical analysis of his negative report about the Glaneuse from 2000 for the heirs of Mrs.Ras :
As shown above the refutation of the beautiful work of Vincent where he used his model outside in the neighbourhood of the Hague in the nature of the dunes in august 1883 contains merely four "simple" elements:
1) The signature
2) The brushstroke
3) The colour-scheme
4) The geografical whereabouts of the painting.
ABSOLUTE NECESSITY TO DATE THE AGE OF THE CANVAS :
Before I will treat these four elements it is necessary to talk here about the history of the distribution of the Dutch work of Vincent van Gogh, because it is of primordial importance to talk here about it to explain why it is of primordial importance in the case of the Glaneuse to date the canvas and that this activity has to be a first and most important task for the objective observer/judge of a painting which was situated about august/september 1883 by the Vincent van Gogh experts of the past, ranging from Albert Plasschaert to De La Faille and Professor Walter Van Beselaere, before judging stylistic elements and other technical properties !
THE HISTORY OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE DUTCH WORKS
OF VINCENT VAN GOGH :
The sad way the atelier of Vincent from Nuenen,where all the work he made from his childhood until his departure to Antwerp, autumn 1885, was distributed on the Dutch artmarket, is now reasonably well documented by several sources .
The main source is the book by Mr.Benno Stokvis, publisher, lawyer and member of the Dutch parlement for the social democrats (SDAP), published in 1926.
Another important more recent source was the research by Dr.Kees Wouters, researcher of the Museum of Breda for the exposition from 2003/2004
organised for the remembrance of the fact that Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853, 150 year before the year 2003 , titled "Lost Findings, the mystery of the cases from Breda ".
Another source were the memories of Jan Couvreur,
who bought the complete atelier of Vincent in August 1902 from Janus Schrauwen.
What is sure at least is that the number of paintings ,drawings and watecolours of Vincent distributed by Jan Couvreur in 1902 is completely
unknown exactly and probabably much higher than indicated by the persons who distributed these works after August 1902, like Schrauwen and Couvreur , because they were threatened by Johanna
Van Gogh -Bonger who tried to sew them after she remarked in 1903 that many works from another source than hers from Vincent were sold at Auctionhouse Oldenzeel in Rotterdam. Schrauwen, who stocked the Nuenen atelier from 1888 till 1902 and sold the complete atelier of Vincent for the ridiculous price of 1 Dutch guilder to Couvreur had even to pay back 129 guilders to Johanna Van Gogh -Bonger for the financial loss she had had, because she officially heritated all the work of Vincent after his death in 1890.
The reason of the complete lack of interest and care for this atelier of Vincent by the mother Mrs. Van Gogh-Carbentus and Willemien Van Gogh , the sister, as we can read in the research of Dr. Wouters , was probably the fact that they were afraid for the dirt and the bacteries coming with the work which was stocked about 14 years on the
attic of Janus Schrauwen in Breda.
What is important however to underline here is the bloody fact that the Dutch work of Vincent was completely unknown in the world until its distribution by Couvreur in Breda in August 1902.
This gives us as an objective and neutral and valuefree, unprejudiced observer of the Dutch work of Vincent a very important certainty!
All the work with a signature Vincent coming on the free market and signed Vincent, with a signature more or less equal to the one of Vincent
and painted on canvas from the 19th.century, must be considered as authentic, because there were no examples in the artworld for forgery before 1900!
Because the Van Gogh Museum systematically and structurally does not care about this scientific and logic truth and fundamental insight they boycot in doing so in fact the scientific research of Dutch work of Vincent appearing on the free market. The Glaneuse is a beautiful example of this boycot of the real science of the work of Vincent van Gogh as they do not even try to date the canvas. Because as I remarked as an experienced observer with all my decennialong experience with dating of canvasses from Dutch painters from the 19th century after observing thousands and thousands of backsides of paintings, the Glaneuse was from the period of Vincent, because the canvas was from that period ( about 1883, anyway before 1900! ).
So the combination of an original 19th.century
canvas with an original signature Vincent, looking more or less like Vincent signed, leaves
only one scientific conclusion: REAL VAN GOGH!!!
THE SHAM OF THE DATING-PROCEDURE OF 2000 by LOUIS VAN TILBORGH :
When I received the painting (F-23) in the spring of 2002 from the auctionhouse I remarked that the cardboard still was virgin and , exactly as the artdealer Jacob de Vries had sold the painting in 1911 to Dr. Pieter Ras, covered the backside completely. Nobody ever had felt the necessity to remove a part of the cardboard to look at the real canvas for a dating procedure and eventually for a comparison with canvasses of a Vincent painting in a Dutch museum from the Hague-period. So also Louis van Tilborgh did not do so when he checked the work in 2000, a prove that the socalled careful research of the
Van Gogh Museum was a complete sham for the reasons I tried to explain in the last contribution here above. No serious argument about the age of the work can be given without a realistic and concrete observation of the canvas itself and without this a refutation of the painting becomes awkward and even an observation we can only call an opinion, but not a scientific research, and even an opinion based on to few elements and not thrustworthy.
As the painting is worth millions of euros this shows in the clearest way the lack of respect of Louis van Tilborgh for the financial interests of the family Ras and is in my opinion also a careless way of working, so that we can wonder if here the border between legal and illegal is not passed and I as an honest valuer of paintings have to answer this question in a positive way:
the research of Louis van Tilborgh of F-23 was a complete illegal sham in 2000 and not worth the name research.
THE VAN GOGH MUSEUM: NO DESIRE OF REAL RESEARCH OF THE NEW OR UNKNOWN BUT A REAL DESIRE TO CONTROL AND DOMINATE THE MARKET.
Here I have to agree with the sad and horrible conclusion of Benoit Landais when he says litteraly in his fantastic book about the Glaneuse at page 81, in which he proves in a, scientifically spoken impressive way ,the authenticity of the work, that the care of the Van Gogh Museum is not lying in the research, the expertise or the history of art but in a intransparent control and/or domination of the market.
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE REPORT OF LOUIS VAN TILBORGH FROM 2000 for the heirs of Mrs. Ras:
Though in fact my general technical arguments inspired by my long experience as valuer of paintings should in fact already be sufficient to declare the report of Van Tilborgh scientifically
improper and insufficient, as it is mainly based on the false report of Van Gelder , which is uncritically followed and supported still by Van Tilborgh, I will try to talk here about the poor four elements Van Tilborgh used to
denounce the Glaneuse . As is visible in the report though attention is given , only four lines are about the painting, to strange bureaucratic and administrative things, which have in fact nothing to do with the painting, but are in fact important because they have a meaning.
The contract which the person who contacts the Van Gogh Museum must sign means that the Museum gives the opinion only for that person and officially is declared that it is only an opinion and that that opinion gives no guarantee for the future. This is as such a very odd situation and contradicts completely with the extremely big mouth the experts of the Van Gogh Museum have in this world and the enormous significance given to that opinion by the auctionworld.
No auctionhouse dares to auction a painting of Vincent van Gogh without the consent of the Van Gogh Museum and as the recent past has proved they actively intervene when an auctionhouse dares to sell a painting of Vincent without their consent and on the basis of an expertise of an independent Vincent van Gogh expert as Benoit Landais.( Bordeaux sveral years ago is an example of the active intervention of the Van Gogh Museum).
For example Sothebys and Christies give a guarantee of at least 5 years for the attribution to an artist, when a painting is offered for sale as an authentic one of a painter. Even the small auctionhouses in Holland give a a limited guarentee of three weeks in general after the date the auction finished.
Also is indicated that one can go to the judge when one does not agree with the verdict, a path I have chosen in december 2010 as the last chance to rectify the negative verdict about the Glaneuse and the Man with the hat and to try to change it in a positive one by real research by the museum instead of the superficial, unscientific and even wrong observations and methods by Louis van Tilborgh as shown already above. I even asked the judge to put the Glaneuse back in the Official Oeuvrecatalog, where it belongs. I was supported in this vision by many new researches and findings
from 2002 -2010.
The most important objective scientific new findings were given by Dr. Jaegers from the laboratory of Bornheim in Germany. Not only contradict these findings with the opinion of Jan Van Gelder, because the hypothesis that the signature was false was corrected and changed to the conclusion that the signature was authentic and that the colour of the exact pigment of the signature came back on several places in the painting.
Other interesting findings were reported by the extensive and objective report of Benoit Landais
in his book about the Glaneuse, in which he minituously and strictly honest and objective gives an authentification of the Glaneuse, based
on scientifical arguments, application of the colorimetric method on the work, and general ideological arguments , explaining the cultural history of the significance of the phenomen Glaneuses and Glaneurs, putting these in the French historical tradition, going back to the deep middleages as a right of the poor in France to collect the last remainings of the harvest.
Also Landais applied the catagories of Maurits van Dantzig to the two works, as he also wrote a book about the bust of the bearded man with hat.
He is a very good student of Maurits van Dantzig, in the sense that he can apply in a very good way the 150 categories, explained in his book about Vincent, on the works offered to him for expertise and evaluation.
Another important step was the photo made by Lumiere Technology in Paris, an institute specialised in photography of paintings.
In doing so we found even a little hair and a fingerprint under the old varnish layers on the Glaneuse and in the opinion of Landais surely of the painter who signed the work, signed with a Vincent signature, which in the opinion of Landais is a completely natural signature, representive of the way Vincent van Gogh used to sign.
Disappointing was the verdict of the judge that the Van Gogh Museum has the right to have its own opinion,even, as proved by us, if this opinion is wrong, because in this case that means that the paintings are actually worthless and the financial value insignificant, as the auctionhouses who can make high revenues, like Sothebys and Christies follow blind and uncritical the verdicts of the Van Gogh Museum an do not accept expertises of independent Vincent van Goghh experts.
So in fact this means that the situation is crazy
and impossible for the people who find new works of Vincent van Gogh. It is a vicious circle and the judge cooperates with this system and sends the owner back home with nothing even when he has all the scientific proves of authenticity of the work.
So the organisation mainly responsible for this for owners of new or unknown works found on the free market sickening situation, the Van Gogh Museum gives no guarantee at all and gives only negative verdicts based on unscientific findings and observations.
I have the opinion that this situation has to change.Only for the love for the work of Vincent this is absolutely necessary,
Or the Van Gogh Museum begins to take the task they have serious and they present serious research and and serious opinions , based on serious research or they retire and stop playing the predominant role they play in the artmarket and stop controling and dominating the artmarket.
Will be continued,
Drs.Philip silbernberg