DHAKA: Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum on Monday unveiled a newly discovered landscape painting from the height of the Dutch master’s career, abandoned for years as a forgery in a Norwegian attic.

‘Sunset at Montmajour’, a large oil landscape from 1888, was unveiled to applause by the museum’s director Axel Rueger as a ‘unique experience that has not happened in the history of the Van Gogh Museum’.

Depicting a landscape of oaks in the south of France, the painting was brought to the museum from a private collection.

Researchers set to work and authenticated it based on comparisons with Van Gogh’s techniques and a letter he wrote on July 4 in 1888, in which he described the painting.

It had been lying for years in the attic of a Norwegian collector who thought the painting was a forgery, after buying it in 1908, reports The Straits Times.

BDST: 1727 HRS, SEPT 09, 2013
RoR/SRS