For the past 50 years, the Van Gogh Museum has stepped away from discussions about forgeries of Van Gogh, a practice that ended in a shocker of a research piece published in The Burlington Magazine identifying three purported Van Gogh works that the leading research center on the artist has concluded are fakes. One is Interior of a Restaurant, which surfaced in the 1950s and was regarded as a second version of Interior of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant le Chalet, Paris, which Van Gogh painted in November or December of 1887. The giveaway that Interior of a Restaurant is faked is twofold: First and foremost, one of the colors is Manganese blue, a synthetic pigment only patented in 1935, and second, the flowers include sunflowers, which wouldn’t have made it to November on tabletops and likely were an interpretation of the forger working from a black-and-white photo. Another potential fake — Head of a Woman, sold for $993,250 in 2011 — is now thought to be a copy made between 1902 and 1909 and squirreled away for a century.
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