Poland has opened an exhibition featuring the only Van Gogh painting it owns - a rare early landscape estimated to be worth several million euros.
The work, titled "Farms Among the Trees", dates from 1883, when the poor Dutch artist was still learning to paint in the countryside around The Hague.
This small oil painting is "interesting because of its modesty and because it shows a completely different side of Van Gogh," says Agata Smolnicka, co-curator of the exhibition in Warsaw.
"Works from The Hague are relatively rare," points out Teio Medendorp, an expert at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. "He painted about 75 paintings there, but only 30 have survived," he tells AFP.
The painting ended up in a carpenter's attic, along with a pile of other paintings Van Gogh left behind when he went abroad.
The carpenter eventually sold "this trash," as he called it, at no price to a dealer. The painting then ended up in Switzerland.
A Polish collector living in Britain, Charles Zbigniew Karol-Porczynski, bought the painting in 1987 and donated it, along with several hundred other paintings, to the Catholic Church in his country.
The new exhibition at the John Paul II and Primate Wyszynski Museum in Warsaw explores the various traces of this rare painting.
Stefania Ambroziak, another co-curator of the exhibition, believes this painting is "Van Gogh before Van Gogh" and is from the time when the future artist "was getting acquainted with oil paints and learning how to apply the colors."
"He was very good at mixing colours. And he contrasted red and green," says Medendorp.
"He was a born colourist, but it was only when he really learned colours in Paris (...) that he became a great painter," he adds.
The exhibition "Van Gogh. The Story of a Painting" will continue to be shown until December. / BGNES
