Vincent van Gogh lived in Paris for two years with his brother Theo. Their apartment was located just a few minutes from Montmartre, the famous hill in the city’s 18th arrondissement. Now, a previously unknown sketch of the famous landmark has been confirmed as one of van Gogh’s drawings. The work is a dusky sketch that shows a cluster of buildings and windmills on top of the Montmartre and it also depicts a quarry further down the hill. The piece is titled “The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry” and was acquired by the Netherlands’ Van Vlissingen Art Foundation. They collaborated with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to confirm its authenticity, writes Smithsonian Magazine. Up until 1911, the word had been held by van Gogh’s sister-in-law, who cared for the artist’s collection after his death. The authentication soon led to revelations about a similar drawing titled “The Hill of Montmartre,” which had been removed from a list of van Gogh’s work in 2001 because of doubts about its origins. But seeing the two sketches side-by-side made curators change their minds. The drawings date to 1886, the beginning of van Gogh’s formative years in Paris. In the drawings, you can see the artist begin to shift towards the more experimental style of the Impressionists, writes Smithsonian.
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