Art experts have called into question New York–based LMI Group International’s claim that a painting of a fisherman found at a garage sale is a long-lost work by Vincent van Gogh. In a lengthy report, the company concluded that its investigation “has yielded the evidence required to identify [the unknown work] as an autograph work by the artist.”
Wouter van der Veen, a scholar specializing in the Dutch Post-Impressionist who previously worked for Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, told ARTnews that the artwork, titled Elimar and dated by LMI Group to 1889, the year before van Gogh’s death, is not authentic because “the painting technique and the choice of colors are very different from van Gogh’s… The lines, the strokes, the impasto, everything is very different.”
In his message to ARTnews, van der Veen, who has not reviewed the artwork in person, suggested that LMI Group’s intention was to fetch a high price once the work was recognized as an authentic van Gogh. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, LMI Group believe the work could be worth at least $15 million. (The most expensive van Gogh work to ever sell at auction was for $117 million at Christie’s New York in 2022.)
In an email to ARTnews, LMI Group said that the $15 million figure “represents not an assumed valuation of Elimar but the flooring of a valuation that would justify the time and expense of a comprehensive forensic analysis of the kind undertaken for Elimar.” Additionally, by producing the report backed by research, LMI Group has “the expectation that the painting will be available for acquisition in the future, potentially in a museum or collection where it will remain accessible to scholars and the public.”
Several art experts have also argued that the work was actually painted by a little-known 20th-century Danish artist Henning Elimar, who died in 1989.
On its website, LMI Group says that it identifies what it calls “orphaned artworks” by “using rigorous data science and proprietary technology” to “authenticate, underwrite, and bring to market previously unknown or forgotten works of art from the world’s great artists.”
The company bought the painting in 2019 from an anonymous antiques collector for an undisclosed sum. The previous owner had paid less than $50 for it after finding the canvas at a garage sale in Minnesota. LMI Group then assembled a team of 20 experts and organizations —including chemists, curators, and patent lawyers—who compiled a 458-page document arguing that the work is an authentic van Gogh.
William J. Havlicek, who published a 2010 book titled Van Gogh’s Untold Journey that examined the artist’s letters, served as the lead art historian for research on the project. Scientific Analysis of Fine Art (SAFA), a material science firm, conducted the scientific analysis on the painting, led by its president Jennifer Mass, who has been a professor of conservation science for over 25 years and who has analyzed four other van Goghs, according to a spokesperson.
(Per a comment in the report, “[n]o scholar, scientist or institution who or which LMI Group engaged in connection with the information presented in this Report has any present, future, contingent, direct, or indirect financial interest in the painting Elimar. Each has been compensated at that person’s customary rate of compensation for that person’s professional services.)
The company spent more than $30,000 investigating the painting, going so far as to genetically test a hair that was embedded in the canvas in the hope it belonged to van Gogh. (The result was “inconclusive,” per the report.)
LMI Group said it believes the portrait would have been created while van Gogh was at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric sanitarium in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. The artist checked himself into the sanitarium and he remained there from May 1889 to May 1890, where he painted The Starry Night (1889) and other iconic paintings.
Van Gogh Museum’s Second Dismissal
On January 31, the Van Gogh Museum said—for the second time—that Elimar is not by van Gogh. “Based on our opinion, which we previously expressed in 2019 regarding the painting, we maintain our view that this is not an authentic painting by Vincent van Gogh,” the Dutch institution dedicated to the artist wrote in an email to ArtDependence Magazine.
In 2019, the museum told LMI Group that the painting could not be attributed to van Gogh for stylistic reasons. According to LMI Group, representatives from the Van Gogh Museum have not evaluated the painting in person. In an email to the museum, LMI Group’s chairman, president, and CEO Lawrence M. Shindell said, “We are … puzzled why the Van Gogh Museum invested less than 24 hours to summarily reject the facts and evidence presented in the 456-page report without offering any meaningful explanations.”
The Van Gogh Museum did not respond to ARTnews for additional comment.
Van der Veen, the van Gogh scholar who also recently founded the nonprofit Van Gogh Academy in France, wrote on February 2 on LinkedIn: “The so-called van Gogh painting of a fisherman … was painted by Henning ELIMAR, a Danish artist.”
The word “Elimar,” presumed to be the sitter’s name by LMI Group, is scrawled in the lower righthand corner of the painting, where artists typically sign their names. LMI Group’s report does not state if it ruled out Elimar as a potential creator of the painting in question. In an email to ARTnews, LMI Group said Elimar “was never considered as a potential author of the work” as his oeuvre lacks “any similarities in style, technique, subject matter, or epoch.” Additionally the firm “did not identify any evidence of twentieth-century materials in the artists’ media.”
“After LMI Group published their conclusions, it took less than 48 hours for amateurs and van Gogh lovers” to identify the painting as by Elimar, he told ARTnews via LinkedIn messages.
In response to van der Veen’s comments, LMI Group told ARTnews that the artist Henning Elimar “does not appear to have included figures in his works.”
“[Elimar’s] pastoral landscapes bear no stylistic resemblance to the oil on canvas introduced by LMI Group,” the company wrote in an email to ARTnews. “In addition to multiple other bases for its authentication and dating, the painting introduced by LMI Group is wholly consistent with a 19th century palette and shows no evidence of 20th century innovations. Mr. van der Veen has neither seen the painting nor apparently considered the findings in our report.”
A Character Called Elimar
In the 458-page report, LMI Group argues that van Gogh had a “voracious appetite for reading” and that Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was one of his favorite writers. LMI Group claims a character called “Elimar” appears his 1848 novel The Two Baronesses, and served as the inspiration for van Gogh’s painting.
Responding to LMI Group’s argument, van der Veen told ARTnews that he is “the leading scholar in the specific field of literary sources in van Gogh’s correspondence. As such, I’m in a good position to challenge their … argument.” He pointed out that “references to my publications on the matter are … absent from LMI Group’s bibliography.”
Van der Veen said he receives “50 to 100 requests a year from individuals or organizations who believe they own an unknown van Gogh,” and that in his view LMI Group’s report is “full of conjectures, weird assumptions, and useless information.”
ARTnews spoke to van Gogh scholar Michael Lobel, a professor at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY and the author of Van Gogh and the End of Nature. He said the fact that his peers, including van der Veen and Martin Pracher, an art appraiser and lecturer at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, “appear to have identified a much more likely author of the painting [demonstrates that] expertise is not only alive and well but also still extremely valuable, despite any fashionable claims to the contrary.” (Neither Lobel nor Pracher have reviewed the painting in person.)
Pracher wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on February 2 that while researching the artwork Elimar, “I found a paining with a pretty similar signature. Now either I have found my first van Gogh or a work [by] the little-known Danish artist…Henning Elimar.”
Analysis of dye
LMI Group hired the services of the New York–based Scientific Analysis of Fine Art (SAFA), whose clients, according to its website include the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the MunchMuseet, the Barnes Foundation, to analyze Elimar. The company provides scientific expertise for authenticating and attributing fine art to museums, auction houses, galleries, and collectors.
In the report, SAFA said that after “using elemental, molecular, microscopic, and holistic imaging modalities [it] had identified “the presence of pigments … and additives that are in keeping with [the late 19th century].”
One of these pigments is PR50, which SAFA states was patented in 1905 as the barium salt of the dye. The company suggests, however, that other forms of the dye may have existed before 1905, which would therefore justify its detection in Elimar if it were indeed painted 16 years earlier. ARTnews asked Steven Saverwyns, the head of the painting lab at the Brussels-based Royal Institute of Cultural Heritage, if van Gogh could have possibly had access to PR50.
“[SAFA] has no definitive proof that PR50 was actually produced between 1883 and 1905—only that it was a possibility,” he wrote in an email to ARTnews. “Further research is needed on the history of synthetic organic pigments (which are derived from dyes by converting them into salts). While their hypothesis may be correct, I guess the question remains open for debate unless PR50 is conclusively identified in a painting with a verifiable pre-1905 date.”
SAFA did not respond to arequest for comment from ARTnews.
Jennifer Mass, SAFA’s president, posted on LinkedIn on January 31 that working on Elimar “was a fascinating opportunity to delve into the azo dye patent literature and make an exciting new discovery.”
“Yet another example of how this type of interdisciplinary research requires extensive collaboration,” she wrote.
Van der Veen told ARTnews that SAFA “seemed to do a good job with their analysis, but the results are in no way conclusive to the case.”
“It is impossible to single out a particular painter based on pigment analysis,” he said.
A Discovery Worthy of Media Attention?
Bendor Grosvenor, a leading British art historian who has previously discovered several lost Old Master paintings, has questioned why LMI’s report is generating so much uncritical media attention. Grosvenor wrote on Bluesky on February 1, “The mystery to me is why this story, and others like it, gain so much worldwide traction when they’re complete non-starters.”
“I am mystified as to why it has generated so much media attention,” Grosvenor told ARTnews by email.
Grosvenor has yet another theory about the painting. “It looks like this painting is a copy by Henning Elimar of a painting by Michael Peter Ancher,” he said. LMI Group’s report states that the painting’s composition is “clearly based upon a painting [Portrait of Niels Gaihede, ca. 1870s–80s] by the Danish artist Michael Ancher (1849–1927),” but attributes that copying to van Gogh. The report adds that the Post-Impressionist had a history of copying works by historical artists, as was the norm for that day, and during his stay in Saint-Rémy he produced 33 “translations” of other artist’s paintings, including by Delacroix, Millet, and Gauguin.
