The Red Vineyard

The Red Vineyard is painted on a piece of burlap, privately primed and sized to a Toile de 30 by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh in the first days of November 1888. The Red Vineyard was exhibited for the first time at the annual exhibition of Les XX, 1890 in Brussels, and sold for 400 Francs (which is equal to about €800-850 or $1,000-1,050 today) to Anna Boch, an impressionist painter, member of Les XX and art mecene from Belgium; Anna Boch was the sister of Eugène Boch, another impressionist painter and a friend of Van Gogh, too, who had painted Boch's portrait (Le Peintre aux Étoiles) in Arles, in autumn 1888. For a while, The Red Vineyard was mistakenly believed to be the only work sold during Van Gogh's lifetime. Like The Night Café, it was acquired by the famous Russian collection Sergei Shchukin, was then natonalised by the Bolsheviks with the rest of his collection and eventually passed to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.