Vincent by Candlelight

On the outskirts of Paris one day in 1946, Reeves Lewenthal, a wide-awake young U.S. art dealer, stopped his car, got out and ruefully inspected a flat tire. It was a blowout all right and he had no spare. Then, as Lewenthal retells it, he made for a shadowy little bistro, telephoned a garage and ordered a bite to eat. A few age-stained canvases were hung about the walls. One even had a hole in it. Lewenthal flicked on his cigarette lighter and looked more closely at the grimy thing. He almost jumped out of his skin.

This week in Beverly Hills, the U.S. public got to see what had startled Motorist Lewenthal: a self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh, one of the finest of the many he did, which had lain unknown for almost 60 years. It was a major find.

The Halo of Heat. Van Gogh did the picture at Aries, on Dec. 7, 1888, in the small hours of a restless night. He had been obsessed, he wrote his brother Theo, by a dream of painting himself by candlelight. He got up, lit a candle, put on his old green jacket and began to paint furiously; about three hours later he stopped, leaving the lower fourth of the portrait unpainted. Even unfinished, it was a work exploding with energy. Out of the dark haft of the body the bony head leaped like a candle flame; the face, green-eyed and red-lipped, glared with the fury of a fire-demon; and around it burned a halo of white heat, darkening outward to citron and orange. By dawn Van Gogh had lost interest in finishing his work. Next day he traded his Study by Candlelight, still wet, for five Japanese prints. The dealer, perhaps worried about getting his money's worth, had Vincent fill in the unpainted space with a quick sketch of one of the Japanese prints. The painting was sold to a cleric named Salles, then apparently passed through two more owners until, in 1917, it was sold to a cafe on the Rue des Petits Carreaux. What happened after that, how the painting eventually got to the bistro outside Paris, nobody seemed to know.

A Good Bit More. Lewenthal, proprietor of the moneymaking Associated American Artists Galleries (Manhattan, Chicago, Beverly Hills), who has promoted the work of many a U.S. artist (e.g., Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton) on to Christmas cards, De Beers diamonds ads, etc., offered to buy the picture for 50,000 francs (about $400 at the time). But the canny patron was in no hurry; after the painting was authenticated as Van Gogh's, he upped his price to a good bit more. Lewenthal paid the price, but for "two years of agony" he could not get the picture out of France. "Elements," he explains mysteriously, tried to bilk him of his find. Finally, last July, after a series of trips to France, Lewenthal managed to get the painting out. In the meantime, he had located a buyer; he sold the Van Gogh, for a price so high that "no one would believe it," to Cinemagnate William Goetz, who insured it for $200,000, took it to California and hung it in his den.

This week, for a change, the portrait of Vincent hung in Lewenthal's Beverly Hills gallery, at the end of a long corridor, amid deep-red drapes, in candlelight subtly augmented by spotlights. The first night was an invitation show, intended for 500 closely screened art lovers, from Thomas Mann to Shirley Temple. For the next couple of days, anybody could look at it. Then it would go back to blaze in Mr. Goetz's den.

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