London buyer paid £45 for junk-shop painting; it later sold for up to $15m

A painting bought for just £45 from a London junk shop in 1968 went on to become a multimillion-euro artwork after experts confirmed that it was an original by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. The painting, titled Peasant Woman in front of a Farmhouse, was sold to a private collector for approximately €12 million to €15 million at the TEFAF Maastricht art fair in the Netherlands in March 2020.The buyer who first recognised its possible value was Luigi Grosso, an Italian working for the BBC, The Art Newspaper reported. He came across the painting in a shop in Belsize Park, north London, and noticed that it carried the signature “Vincent” in the lower left corner. While the shopkeeper believed it belonged to an artist with that surname, Grosso suspected that it could be an original Van Gogh.His decision to buy the painting for £45 proved significant.