The Portland Art Museum just got a nice holiday gift — a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. "The Ox-Cart" was owned by longtime Oregon residents who decided to share the work with the public. When they approached the museum, the owners didn't mention at first that it was by the famous Dutch artist.
The painting has been obscure pretty much since 1884, when it was created. There's not a sunflower in sight. Van Gogh's "The Ox-Cart" is dark as coffee grounds.
Curator Bruce Guenther describes the painting as "brown and black and grey and green ... and it's filled with an atmosphere."
The painting was done in Nuenen, a Dutch village near the Belgian border. Van Gogh made it before he went to Arles and other towns in southern France and discovered sunshine. In Holland, he painted poor peasants, in an eternity of moody brown shadow. In this case, a beast of burden — the scrawny ox — is hauling a rickety cart, probably full of dung.
Guenther says "The Ox-Cart" is an important early work. Van Gogh had been using oil paint for only three years, and you can see him learning to manipulate his oils like icing.
"He becomes an artist in the gesture, the way he uses paint to sculpt the leg of the ox," the curator says. "The way the wheel becomes a definition lifted off the surface of the painting with the brush is Van Gogh establishing his vocabulary as a painter. He becomes Van Gogh here. In Arles, he finds his place in history."
A Curator's Dream
The story of how this Van Gogh got to Portland is a curator's dream.
Guenther received a call saying the Sohn family of Roseburg, Ore., "had a painting and they weren't sure what to do with it." The curator was traveling and didn't get the message right away. Finally Guenther spoke with Howard Sohn, the eldest of five Sohn sons. Howard Sohn didn't immediately say how important the painting was.
"You know, you get these calls all the time," Guenther says. "I finally asked what it was and he mentioned Van Gogh and I thought, Do I need to come to Roseburg?"
Howard Sohn represents his parents, Fred and Frances Sohn. Howard Sohn was a child when he first saw "The Ox-Cart." His grandfather purchased the painting in 1950 and hung it in the family home in Connecticut.
A Van Gogh in the Dining Room
"It was the only work of art in their dining room, which had a big, long table at which we all sat, all [the] grandchildren," Howard Sohn says. "I looked at it through the '50s in their dining room. And then by 1960, it came to my parents and hung in their house."
Despite the painting's dark nature, he doesn't think it's gloomy.
"I've never experienced it as a down or sad painting," Howard Sohn says. "The climate, of course, is very similar to what we experience in Oregon ... so it's not a shock to see grayness and fog. Nor do we experience grayness and fog here as necessarily the worst thing in the world."
Dreary or not, eventually his parents and the rest of the family agreed their Van Gogh deserved a wider audience, so they donated the work to the Portland Art Museum.
A Painting's Journey
Brian Ferriso, the museum's executive director, hopes the gift encourages others to donate important works as well.
"I have always thought collectors are not necessarily owners, they're more renters," Ferriso says. "They rent these works for a period of time and ultimately the works transcend all of us. And they really do belong to a larger institution and mission and to our larger ideals about what art and culture is."
The art world likes to talk about provenance — where a picture was, and where it went. Van Gogh's mother had this painting for years — Vincent left it behind when he left Nuenen in 1885. Eventually, she sold "The Ox-Cart" to a dealer, who sold it to a collector, who sold it to a few other Dutchmen. And then to Howard Sohn's grandparents. And then it went to his parents.
Then it disappeared from public view until it turned up in Portland.
The city of Portland wouldn't mind the world beating a path to its door, to see the Van Gogh. Officials hope that a new direct flight from Amsterdam will bring some cultural tourism money to town.
After all, Van Gogh is one of the most popular painters in the history of art. And his little-known "Ox-Cart" might just draw some crowds to sample the work of a young Dutch artist, before sunshine broke on his canvas and changed everything.
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