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The heirs of French banker Jean-Marc Vernes who bought on December 6th 1992 a painting by Van Gogh, "Garden in Auvers", have requested the cancellation of the sale by a Paris court on grounds that his work was doubtful.
"Garden in Auvers" is amongst a series of Van Gogh's works which have been questioned by some researchers lately. One of them, Benoit Landais, said last year that this painting was surely not by his hand. Jean-Marc Vernes, who died in 1995, bought the painting for 55 million francs (US $ 10 million) in a Paris sale conducted by auctioneer Jean-Claude Binoche.
His heirs have enacted a court action against the latter on November 8th 1998 to cancel that sale saying they have been victim of a fraud. They added that this court action was also prompted by the fact that this painting was now unsaleable because of the controversy surrounding it.
Auctioneer Jean-Claude Binoche expressed surprise at the court action which he did not consider as appropriate because there had been no official statement from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam that this painting was not authentic.
"There is no reason to say that this painting is not a genuine Van Goghand I therefore cannot understand why I am being sued," he said.
The heirs of Jean-Marc Vernes stated that Mr Binoche had wrongly indicated in his sale catalogue that this painted, dated July 1890, a few days before Van Gogh committed suicide, had first belonged to the artist's sister while other sources attributed its provenance to Claude Emile Schuffenecker, a painter who had known Van Gogh and who is now suspected
to have produced some fakes during his career. Adrian Darmon
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