Natura morta con boccale di birra e frutta

If this is a Van Gogh, it is one of his very first attempts at oil paint. The year on it is 1881, when Vincent was 28, newly decided on art, and still living with his parents in the Dutch village of Etten, teaching himself by copying and by arranging plain objects on a table. A beer mug and a scatter of apples and pears sit against a dark ground, worked in the heavy earth tones he used long before he ever saw the south of France. The trouble is the attribution. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam doubts it is his at all and allows that an unknown painter made it. It carries a number in the old catalogues even so, a foothold from the days when it was accepted without question.