Art: Two Coaches

Admirers of Vincent Van Gogh got a tantalizing glimpse this week of an all-but-unknown painting by the great Dutchman. New York Herald Tribune Art Critic Emily Genauer, who lives in Croton, N.Y., had run across it one evening in the living room of a neighbor. The neighbor insisted on anonymity, but agreed to let Critic Genauer print a black & white reproduction in her Sunday column.

Although the picture, of two high-wheeled Tarascon Coaches, has been catalogued as an authentic Van Gogh and was mentioned by the artist in a letter to his brother, few art lovers have ever had a chance to see even so much as a photograph of it. Bought by an Italian sculptor who gave it to a friend from Montevideo, it had been kept most of the time since 1906 in a family vault in Uruguay.

Last spring, when an art dealer brought Tarascon Coaches to New York, a few museum directors and private collectors got a look at it before the present owner paid an undisclosed price (probably close to $85,000), carried it home.

For those who were not content to see a Van Gogh in smudgy black & white, there was testimony from the artist that the subject was one after his own color-hungry heart. Wrote Van Gogh in one of his last letters: “I have just painted that red and green vehicle in the courtyard of the inn … a simple foreground of grey gravel, a background very very simple too, pink and yellow walls, with windows with green shutters and a patch of blue sky. The two carriages very brightly colored, green and red, the wheels —yellow, black, blue and orange.”