Tramonto a Montmajour

Van Gogh painted this on the 4th of July, 1888, out on the scrubland near Arles, and the next day he described it in a letter to his brother Theo, oak bushes and a sky going gold over the ruins of an old abbey. That letter is part of why we can be sure it is his. For most of the last century nobody was. The canvas sat in a Norwegian collection dismissed as a fake, even stored in an attic, until the Van Gogh Museum spent two years on it and, in 2013, confirmed it, the first full-size painting newly added to his catalogue since 1928. Knowing that, you can look at the dry, thickly worked yellows of the bushes and the low sun behind the abbey and place the exact afternoon he stood there.