Anna Boch
1848–1936 · Belgium · Pointillism
The story
In 1890, at the yearly exhibition of the avant-garde group Les Vingt in Brussels, a painting by Vincent van Gogh sold for 400 francs. The buyer was Anna Boch, and it was the only painting van Gogh is known to have sold in his lifetime.
Boch was no mere patron. A wealthy heiress of the Boch ceramics family, she was herself a painter and the only woman admitted to Les Vingt, working in the dotted Neo-Impressionist manner of Seurat and Signac along the Belgian coast. Her brother Eugène was a painter too and a friend of van Gogh, who had painted his portrait in Arles.
She went on collecting the new art all her life and left a body of her own sunny landscapes. The van Gogh she bought, 'The Red Vineyard', now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.