Bought for £45, sold for millions: How a London junk-shop find was identified as a Van Gogh

The dramatic history of Vincent van Gogh’s Peasant Woman in front of a Farmhouse (Paysanne devant une chaumière) remains one of the art world's most famous provenance stories. Painted in 1885, the canvas famously surfaced at a Staffordshire farm sale in 1967 where it was bought for just £4, before changing hands in a London junk shop a year later for £45.

The £4 Van Gogh: Inside one of art history's greatest finds

Exhibited by London gallery Dickinson at Tefaf Maastricht, the masterpiece ultimately found a private buyer for an estimated €12 million to €15 million and set the record for the fair’s highest reported sale.

"We are happy to say that subject to the usual contractural paperwork and anti-money laundering due diligence checks being carried out, we have agreed the sale of the Van Gogh," Emma Ward, Dickinson's managing director was quoted saying at an old interview.

the painting spent decades at Billington Farm near Stafford, UK. It had originally been accepted by farmer John Holme in 1929 as payment for an unpaid agricultural bill, but the family eventually grew tired of the canvas and relegated it to the attic. When his son retired in 1967, the unrecognised artwork was auctioned off in a general farm sale.

Its journey took a dramatic turn a year later when BBC employee Luigi Grosso spotted it in a Belsize Park secondhand shop. Though the shopkeeper assumed the "Vincent" signature belonged to an obscure artist, Grosso sensed its potential and bought it for £45.

After art historian Alan Bowness confirmed its authenticity, Grosso consigned the masterpiece to Sotheby’s New York in 1970, where Hollywood producer Joseph Levine acquired it for $110,000.

Over the following decades, the painting passed through notable hands and returned repeatedly to the auction block. Levine sold it in 1983 for $390,000 to Roberto Polo, a flamboyant Cuban-American collector later entangled in financial extradition proceedings. Polo then resold it in 1985 for £264,000 to a Montreal buyer. By 2001, the canvas made its fourth trip to Sotheby's, fetching $1.7 million from the American collector who ultimately brought it to market at Tefaf. Despite its frequent high-profile commercial appearances, the artwork has made only a single museum showing, at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 2010.

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