London man bought painting for £45 in 1968; it turned out to be a Van Gogh worth up to €15 million

The painting, created in July 1885, is known in French as Paysanne devant une chaumière. Simon C. Dickinson photo A painting bought for just £45 from a London junk shop in 1968 went on to become a multimillion-euro artwork after experts confirmed that it was an original by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. The painting, titled Peasant Woman in front of a Farmhouse, was sold to a private collector for approximately €12 million to €15 million at the TEFAF Maastricht art fair in the Netherlands in March 2020.The buyer who first recognised its possible value was Luigi Grosso, an Italian working for the BBC, The Art Newspaper reported. He came across the painting in a shop in Belsize Park, north London, and noticed that it carried the signature “Vincent” in the lower left corner. While the shopkeeper believed it belonged to an artist with that surname, Grosso suspected that it could be an original Van Gogh.His decision to buy the painting for £45 proved significant. With help from art curator Alan Bowness, who had organised an exhibition of Van Gogh's work at London's Hayward Gallery, Grosso arranged for the painting to be authenticated. It was subsequently sold at Sotheby's in New York i...