Attributed to Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh made more than 2,000 works in about ten years and sold almost none, and once prices soared after his death, imitations and doubtful pictures followed. Questions of authenticity now usually end up with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which gives opinions on paintings submitted to it.

Attributed to Vincent van Gogh is the label a museum uses when it believes a work is his but cannot prove it, and the verdicts can change. Sunset at Montmajour, a landscape near Arles, belonged to the Norwegian industrialist Christian Nicolai Mustad, who put it in his attic after being told it was not genuine. The Van Gogh Museum turned it down in 1991. In 2013 its researchers accepted it, matching the pigments to his Arles work and finding the picture described in a letter to his brother Theo, painted on 4 July 1888.