Unknown van Gogh fetches $550,000 at auction

TOKYO -- An unsigned painting initially valued at $83 was auctioned off Saturday for $550,000 after it was revealed to be a previously unknown work by Vincent van Gogh.

The hammer fell after only about five minutes. The oil painting, a dark profile of a frowning middle-aged peasant woman in a white bonnet, goes to the owner of a small Japanese art gallery.

The Japanese art house organizing Saturday's sale started the bidding at $41,700 after receiving word late Thursday that the piece was a van Gogh.

Previously the Shinwa Art Auction had estimated the value at $83.

Shinwa President Yoichiro Kurata said Friday he originally didn't think the painting was the real thing. But the piece resembled several other known peasant woman paintings by van Gogh, so he sent it last month to Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and asked experts there to examine it.

On Thursday, he said, he received a faxed letter from the museum stating the 16-inch-by 14-inch-picture was indeed the work of the Dutch master.

It was painted around 1884 and is believed to have been restored twice in the 1950s, degrading its quality and value.

The news made headlines across Japan and caught the attention of Toshio Nakamoto, owner of Wood One Museum of Art, a small collection in the village of Yoshiwa in rural Hiroshima prefecture.

The piece had been scheduled for the auction block as part of the private art collection of the Japanese modern artist Kazumasa Nakagawa, who died in 1991.

Kurata said he was not sure when Nakagawa acquired the van Gogh.

According to Kurata, the Van Gogh Museum said X-ray tests showed it to be extensively painted over, obscuring much of van Gogh's original trademark brushwork.