Van Gogh's Only Sale

"The Red Vineyard," painted in Arles in 1888, depicts workers in a vineyard and is the only painting Van Gogh is known to have sold during his lifetime. Van Gogh created the painting from memory after walking through a vineyard near Arles. Anna Boch, who purchased "The Red Vineyard," was a Belgian painter and collector, as well as a member of Les XX, where the painting was exhibited. She was also the sister of Eugène Boch, another impressionist painter and friend of Van Gogh, who painted his portrait in Arles in the autumn of 1888. The sale of "The Red Vineyard" for 400 francs was equivalent to about two months' living expenses for Van Gogh at the time. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh expressed some embarrassment that the Bochs paid the full exhibition price instead of a "friend's price". In 1909, Ivan Morozov, a Russian collector, purchased the painting from a Paris art gallery. Following the Russian Revolution, the painting was nationalized and eventually placed in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where it remains today.