After virtual travel and virtual games, how about becoming a virtual art collector with a share in a multi-million-euro Vincent Van Gogh you can peruse at leisure on the Internet.
A scheme is under way to sell shares in a 27-million-euro work to be hung in the tiny unfurnished room where Van Gogh died at Auvers-sur-Oise, a quaint village an hour’s ride from Paris popular with the Impressionists of late 19th century France.
The Dutchman, currently the world’s most expensive painter, died all but penniless in Auvers, whose main business nowadays is to recall and to pay homage to the likes of Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne or Charles-Francois Daubigny.
It was there that Van Gogh in his last weeks in the summer of 1890 produced an astonishing 70 works in as many days before shooting himself in the chest. Among them was the ”Portrait of Dr Gachet”, auctioned in 1990 for a record $82,5-million, the most expensive masterpiece ever under the hammer.
Auvers as a living museum touts Daubigny’s garden, Dr Gachet’s home, the wheatfields and church made legend by Van Gogh, and the Auberge Ravoux inn where he lived and died.
But as a shrine it has one glaring drawback. A popular tourist venue with an intake of some 400 000 visitors a year, there is not a single canvas anywhere to be seen — including in its museum — by the painter buried in the Auvers cemetery alongside his brother, Theo.
Next year will mark the 150th birthday of Van Gogh, and the village is planning to open to the public the home of Dr Gachet — a friend and patron of the Impressionists — as well as holding an orgy of Van Gogh festivities.
”The village will be decorated with irises, one of Van Gogh’s favourite flowers. We have sent iris bulbs to every home for residents to plant,” said the head of the local tourist office, Jean-Pierre Mantel.
At the Auberge Ravoux, owner Dominique-Charles Janssens hopes that by the March anniversary next year he will be able to hang a work for the first time on the walls of Van Gogh’s bare upstairs
room in the inn. But that will only be possible if his donor-share scheme comes off.
A Belgian who bought the 19th century inn in the mid-1980s after having a bad car crash outside, Janssens is a Van Gogh fan and man with a mission who lives and breathes the sensations he draws from the artist’s works.
A jovial former business executive now aged 54, he revamped and restored the inn in original 19th century style and runs a successful restaurant offering food from old times.
His idea, apparently unique in the world of art investment, is to offer up to half a million shares at 75 euros apiece to finance the acquisition of a 27-million-euro work, one of a series of Van Gogh’s ”Wheatfields” that has been left lying in a
Swiss vault since its 1946 purchase by a Zurich family.
The owner of each share — the limit is set at 10 000 a person — would be given access to view the picture in the room on the Internet at any time of day, a print and an invitation in person to Van Gogh’s room.
”The idea is based on something Van Gogh wrote,” Janssens said in an interview.
”Some day or other,” Van Gogh told his brother Theo in a letter, ”I believe I will find a way of having an exhibition of my own in a cafe.”
Spin-off from the donor-share scheme, Janssens insists, will help to continue the financing of work both at the Auberge Ravoux and at Auvers to help keep the memory and the spirit of Van Gogh alive and pure.
”I have a zen side to me,” said Janssens, who has spent some 15-million euros in 15 years restoring the painter’s last abode to try to ”share my feelings with others.”
”And this is a place with a history where people think about themselves and their lives and find nourishment for the body and for the soul,” he added. – Sapa-AFP