A Van Gogh on the Move

There aren’t many moments in life where you are waiting for a Vincent van Gogh and then happen to get a phone call that there is, in fact, a Van Gogh waiting for you. And that Van Gogh happened to be Tarascon Stagecoach, painted in 1888 as the artist was struggling mightily with mental illness and was himself, waiting for Paul Gauguin to pay him a visit. Van Gogh sketched a stagecoach in the village of Arles, France, where he then lived. He then painted the perhaps lesser-known, but equally stunning, masterwork on the act of waiting and observing, being both patient and electric with the brushstrokes and vivid depiction of the town. 

The question is, what becomes of a painting after it’s completed, the artist passes, and as history suggests, time passes. All of this waiting transcended decades, so let’s follow the path of the Tarascon Stagecoach. Theo van Gogh took ownership after his brother’s death in 1890, who then consigned the work to Julien (Père) Tanguy. By 1895, Tanguy sold the work to Medardo Rosso in Paris, who then gifted the work to Milo Beretta in Montevideo that same year. It was then passed to Beretta’s six heirs in 1935, who sold it to Paula de Koenigsberg in Buenos Aires on May 8, 1945. And then, in 1949, Henry Pearlman—already a prominent art collector of Cezanne watercolors and other Impressionist and modern masters—picked up the phone in New York to hear word of a “lost Van Gogh” in South America. It was a little-known work of an unusual subject in Van Gogh’s canon, only referenced in letters from Vincent to his brother Theo. But there was little to no record that Tarascon Stagecoach stillexisted, or if it was lost in the passing of time and exchange of collectors.