The Red Vineyard Auction History

1888: Painted near Montmajour, Arles, in November 1888 [7].

1890: Exhibited at Les XX in Brussels; purchased during the show by Belgian artist Anna Boch. Theo van Gogh’s account book records the payment of 400 francs on 6 March 1890, documenting the transaction [1].

Late 1909: In Paris, the painting was acquired for the Moscow collector Ivan Morozov, with the Pushkin Museum reporting a price of 20,000 francs. The timing aligns with Galerie Eugène Druet’s Van Gogh exhibition (8–20 Nov 1909) [2][3][4].

1918–1948: After the 1918 nationalisation of Morozov’s collection, the work entered Soviet state holdings, was incorporated into the State Museum of New Western Art by 1923, and upon that museum’s 1948 closure was assigned to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, where it remains [5][6][12].

The Red Vineyard holds outsized market significance because it is widely cited as the only painting verifiably sold by Vincent van Gogh during his lifetime—off the wall at Les XX in Brussels—with Theo’s account book documenting receipt of 400 francs on 6 March 1890 [1][8]. The painting then changed hands privately in Paris in late 1909 for 20,000 francs to Ivan Morozov, a dramatic increase that reflects the rapid posthumous consolidation of Van Gogh’s reputation among leading collectors [2][4].

Since 1918 the work has been in Russian state collections and, following the 1948 redistribution, in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Its long-standing institutional status—and the painting’s fragility, with no outgoing loans for over sixty years—means it has not circulated on the open market for generations [4]. As a result, there are no public auction benchmarks for this specific canvas, even though Van Gogh’s broader market is among the most robust in art history.

For context, top-tier Van Gogh works at auction have achieved record prices: Orchard with Cypresses (1888) fetched $117.2m at Christie’s in 2022, setting a new auction record for the artist [9]. Earlier, Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890) realised $82.5m in 1990, and Laboureur dans un champ (1889) made $81.3m in 2017 [10][11]. Against these benchmarks, The Red Vineyard’s significance lies less in tradable comparability and more in its emblematic role in the Van Gogh market story: the sole lifetime sale, a steep early 20th-century value jump, and permanent museum stewardship that effectively removes it from future market dynamics [1][2][4][8].