# The Painter on the Road to Tarascon > Vincent van Gogh - Arles, July or early August 1888 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/vincent-van-gogh/van-gogh-the-painter-on-the-road-to-tarascon/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-26 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Vincent van Gogh - **Date:** Arles, July or early August 1888 - **Medium:** Oil on canvas - **Dimensions:** 48 x 44 cm (Van Gogh Museum letters edition); the museum's own loss report gives 49 x 45 cm - **Object type:** Painting - **Period:** Dutch, nineteenth century - **Current location:** Whereabouts unknown. Last recorded in the Neu-Stassfurt salt mine near Stassfurt, Saxony-Anhalt, where the Magdeburg museum collection was stored from 1943; not seen since two fires in the mine in April 1945 - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary The only picture in which Vincent van Gogh painted himself whole. The Art Newspaper's Van Gogh specialist counts his other thirty-six self-portraits as all heads or heads-and-shoulders, though Self-Portrait as a Painter in Amsterdam is a half-length with palette and brushes; here he is a small striding figure on a hot road outside Arles, loaded with a stretched canvas, a paintbox and sticks, throwing a hard blue shadow onto the stones. He described it to his brother Theo in a letter of about 13 August 1888 as a quick sketch of himself laden with boxes, sticks and a canvas on the sunny Tarascon road. The Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Magdeburg bought it in 1912, weeks after it hung in the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, which made it one of the earliest van Goghs anywhere to enter a public collection.It was not taken in the 1937 seizure of degenerate art, although 254 other works were taken from that same museum. In 1943 it went down a salt mine at Neu-Stassfurt with more than four hundred other Magdeburg paintings, to a chamber 460 metres underground, immediately below a secret factory building jet engines for the Luftwaffe. American troops reached the mine at noon on 12 April 1945. A fire broke out hours later and a second fire on 30 April. A Monuments Man who went down in May reported the contents entirely reduced to ashes. Nobody has seen the picture since.Whether it burned or was carried out before the fires is not settled and this record does not settle it. The German Lost Art Foundation carries it as cultural property displaced by war, not as Nazi-looted art. A Luther manuscript and a Hasenpflug painting stored in the same mine turned up again after the war, and a former curator of the Magdeburg museum has said for decades that there were not even ash remains of the paintings. The picture survives in three colour reproductions that disagree with each other about its colour, in one black-and-white glass negative of it in its frame, and in the six paintings Francis Bacon made from a reproduction of it in 1957, having never seen the original. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1888** The artist, Arles `[documented]` (origin) Painted at Arles in July or early August 1888 and packed by about 13 August in a roll of thirty-six studies, carried to Paris by the second lieutenant Milliet. Van Gogh describes the picture in letter 660 and lists it first among the contents of the roll. The Van Gogh Museum edition identifies the passage with F 448 / JH 1491. - **1888-1912** Not established `[unknown]` (gap) The roll was consigned to Theo van Gogh in Paris. No source fetched for this record traces the picture from Theo's hands to the Cologne exhibition of 1912, and no dealer, agent or intermediate owner is named anywhere consulted. Twenty-four years of ownership are simply not on the public record, and that gap is recorded here rather than bridged. - **1912** Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Kuenstler, Cologne `[documented]` (exhibition) Shown in the Sonderbund international exhibition at Cologne, 25 May to 30 September 1912. The installation photograph is held by the Rheinisches Bildarchiv Koeln as negative rba_32416, and The Art Newspaper reproduces it with this painting circled. In Cologne the picture was in a conventional mitred frame. - **1912-1943** Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Magdeburg `[documented]` (purchase) Bought a few weeks after the Cologne exhibition, making it one of the earliest van Goghs anywhere to enter a public collection. Inventory GK 558, St 29. The museum's present director, recalling the room, says it hung upstairs on the first floor. No purchase price appears in any source consulted. Reframed shortly after acquisition in a gilded frame with swirling lines and corners that may represent stylised sunflowers. Photographed in colour in the 1930s. Not among the 254 works taken from this museum in the 1937 and 1938 confiscation of degenerate art; The Art Newspaper's Van Gogh specialist judges that it had by then been moved to the storeroom to keep it out of the action, and labels that as his own reading. Artnet News gives the purchase year as 1919, against every other source consulted. - **1943-1945** Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Magdeburg, in wartime storage `[documented]` (evacuation) Evacuated secretly with about four hundred other Magdeburg paintings to the Neu-Stassfurt salt mine, thirty kilometres south of the city, to a worked-out salt void 460 metres down between shafts six and seven. A secret Luftwaffe jet-engine factory operated thirty metres above, worked by Dutch and Polish forced labour. The Art Newspaper's Van Gogh specialist infers that the frames would have been taken off the paintings before the move; no source states it as a fact. Bombs destroyed part of the museum building in January 1945, which vindicated the decision. - **1945-present** Unknown `[unknown]` (loss) American forces reached Stassfurt at midday on 12 April 1945. A fire broke out in the mine hours later and burned four days; a second began on 30 April and burned about two weeks. Major Michael C. Ross of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section inspected in May and reported the contents entirely reduced to ashes, while the military record states that there is no clear evidence whether the fire was set accidentally or deliberately. Only a few small items were recovered. The painting has not been seen since. Whether it burned or was removed before the fires is unresolved: a Luther manuscript and a Hasenpflug painting recorded as stored in the mine reappeared afterwards, and a former curator of the museum reports that of the paintings there were said to be not even remains of ash. No document naming this object and a person who took it exists in anything consulted for this record. - **2001-present** Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg (claimant of record) `[documented]` (registered as lost) Reported by the museum to the German Lost Art Database and published there since 2001 as Lost Art-ID 12812, with the circumstance of loss given as cultural property as war loss. Indexed in Proveana under cultural goods displaced as a result of war, not under cultural goods confiscated as a result of Nazi persecution. Carried by the Monuments Men and Women Foundation on its WWII Most Wanted Art list with a reward of up to USD 25,000. The Volksstimme observed in 2014 that, unlike the degenerate art the Nazi state sold off, the ownership question would itself be unclear if the van Gogh reappeared; that is the newspaper's own sentence and not the museum director's, whose quoted words there are only that she favours famous works of art being accessible to everyone. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - No auction record exists for this painting in any source consulted, and none can. It went from the artist's studio into a public collection by 1912 and has been missing since 1945, so it has never been offered at public sale. The only figure attached to it in the public record is not a price but an estimate of one: at a panel discussion in Magdeburg in 2015 the city's cultural affairs head Matthias Puhle spoke of a van Gogh painting perhaps worth twenty to thirty million euros, in the course of arguing that it is unlikely anyone is quietly keeping it at home. It is not a valuation by an auction house or an insurer, no basis for it is published, and it should not be read as one. For scale within the same museum's losses, Christian Rohlfs's Stilleben mit weissen Lilien, seized from Magdeburg as degenerate art, was offered back to the museum for 145,000 Mark before surfacing at a Duesseldorf auction in 1994; that is a different object and a different category of loss. ## Open questions - Who owned the painting between the roll that Milliet carried to Paris in August 1888 and the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912? No dealer, agent or intermediate owner is named in anything consulted, and twenty-four years of the chain are blank. - What did the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum pay for it in 1912, and out of what fund? No price appears in the museum's own loss report, in the German account of the museum's history, or in the specialist literature consulted. - Which dimension is right? The Van Gogh Museum letters edition gives 48 x 44 cm, the museum's own Lost Art report gives 49 x 45 cm, and the Otsuka Museum, which made a full-size ceramic copy and therefore had to choose, publishes 41.8 x 48 cm in the opposite orientation. - Was the painting shown anywhere between Cologne in 1912 and the evacuation in 1943? No exhibition history for those thirty-one years was found in any source consulted. - Why was this picture left in Magdeburg when 254 works were taken from the same museum in 1937 and 1938, and five van Goghs were taken from Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich? The storeroom explanation is offered as a judgement, not from a document, and no seizure file or museum minute has been published either way. - Do the 150 works the Volksstimme reports as removed from Magdeburg in 1937 and the 254 entries the Freie Universitaet Berlin inventory returns for that museum describe the same action counted differently, or two different things? No source consulted reconciles them. - Is there a surviving pre-1945 colour transparency or plate from which the 1930s colour photograph was printed, and does it still exist in the Magdeburg picture archive? The three colour reproductions in circulation differ materially in hue and nothing consulted says which, if any, is closest to the original photography. - Was the Arnold Boecklin seen in the background of two Helmut Newton photographs and noticed by the museum in 2008 ever authenticated as the picture from the mine? The Monuments Men and Women Foundation says it remains unclear. ## Sources - [1] German Lost Art Foundation, Lost Art Database, search request 12812, 'The painter on the way to Tarascon / Vincent on the way to work', reported by the Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg, published since 2001; gives 49 x 45 cm, inventory GK 558, St 29, and the circumstance of loss as cultural property as war loss. Read 2026-09-26. - [2] German Lost Art Foundation, Proveana research database, search for Tarascon, returning Lost Art-ID 012812 under the research context 'Cultural goods displaced as a result of war'. Read 2026-09-26. - [3] Monuments Men and Women Foundation, WWII Most Wanted Art, 'Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), The Painter on the Way to Tarascon, 1888'; carries the Ross report quotation, the mine depth and shaft numbers, the fire dates and a reward of up to USD 25,000. - [4] Vincent van Gogh, The Letters, letter 660, to Theo van Gogh, Arles, on or about Monday 13 August 1888 (Brieven 1990 no. 665, Complete Letters no. 524), Van Gogh Museum and Huygens Institute scholarly edition; manuscript Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, inv. b565 a-b V/1962. Editorial note identifies the Tarascon passage as F 448 / JH 1491, oil on canvas, 48 x 44 cm, Lost. - [5] Martin Bailey, 'Hunt still on for a Van Gogh self-portrait lost deep in a salt mine during the Second World War', The Art Newspaper, 27 November 2020. - [6] Martin Bailey, 'A lost Van Gogh self-portrait had the most extraordinary frame that included his much-loved sunflowers - here it is reconstructed', The Art Newspaper, 15 January 2021; with Lynn Roberts's analysis and reconstruction of the frame and the 1912 Sonderbund installation photograph, Rheinisches Bildarchiv Koeln rba_32416. - [7] Freie Universitaet Berlin, Forschungsstelle Entartete Kunst, Beschlagnahmeinventar 'Entartete Kunst'. Searched 2026-09-26: full text 'Gogh' returns five works (Berlin Nationalgalerie EK 15674, 15677, 15682; Frankfurt Staedel EK 15774; Munich EK 16554) and none from Magdeburg; full text 'Magdeburg, Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum' returns 254 entries. - [8] Volksstimme, 'Verkauft, verbrannt, verschwunden: Suche nach Magdeburgs Kunstschaetzen', 5 February 2014; quotes Tobias von Elsner's 1995 study and the museum director Gabriele Koester. - [9] Volksstimme, '488 Magdeburger Kunstwerke verschwunden', 5 February 2014; gives the breakdown of 150 works removed in 1937 and 338 counted in the research as war losses. - [10] Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 'Wo ist der Magdeburger van Gogh?', published by NWZ, 30 April 2015; reports the Magdeburg panel discussion with Gabriele Koester, Tobias von Elsner and Matthias Puhle, the recovered library, the absence of ash remains and the flooded mine. - [11] Tim Brinkhof, 'The Hunt: A Vincent van Gogh Masterpiece That Was Lost to Conflict', Artnet News, 10 June 2024. Reached through the in-app browser after plain and browser-agent GET requests were both refused with HTTP 403. Gives the purchase year as 1919, against every other source here. - [12] Commission for Looted Art in Europe, 'Provenance Research: Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg'; records von Elsner's 1995 publication of 338 of about 400 missing paintings and the 1996 return of Luther's Wider Hans Worst. - [13] Otsuka Museum of Art, Naruto, 'Van Gogh's lost masterpiece donated to German museum'; the full-size ceramic copy on display from 3 November 2018, the second copy given to Magdeburg and the handover ceremony of 28 November 2018. - [14] The Estate of Francis Bacon, catalogue raisonne focus, 'Study for Portrait of Van Gogh VI, 1957', catalogue number 57-14; quotes Bacon on the figure as more like a phantom of the road. - [15] The Estate of Francis Bacon, 'Van Gogh by Bacon'; the Hanover Gallery opening of 20 March 1957 and the composition of the series. - [16] Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, collection online, Vincent van Gogh, The Road to Tarascon (La route de Tarascon), Arles, ca. 31 July - 3 August 1888, reed pen and ink over graphite on paper, 24.3 x 31.9 cm, Thannhauser Collection, accession 78.2514.22. - [17] Jonathan Jones, 'Missing in action: artworks presumed to have been destroyed in the war', The Guardian, 4 November 2013; states that the painting is believed to have been burned in an air raid on Germany, which this record records as an error. - [18] Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 'Vincent van Gogh in the South of France, 1888-1889'; the Yellow House, the Studio of the South and Gauguin's arrival and departure. - [19] Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 'The Life of Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890'; the decision to become an artist at twenty-seven, the earlier occupations and the year at Saint-Remy. - [20] Wikimedia Commons API, query action with prop imageinfo and iiprop extmetadata, run 2026-09-26 against the six files used here; every one returns LicenseShortName 'Public domain'. Each file was also downloaded at thumbnail size and looked at before its role was assigned, which is how two candidates were identified as the Kunsthaus Zuerich drawing rather than the painting. - [21] Wikipedia, 'The Painter on the Road to Tarascon'. TERTIARY, and used here only for the F 448 / JH 1491 pair and for its own errors, which are documented in the record: it gives the condition as destroyed in bombing and the location as Kaiser Fredrich Museum, Stassfurt. Replace with the Van Gogh Museum letters edition and the museum's Lost Art entry, both already cited above. - [22] Wikipedia (German), 'Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (Magdeburg)' / Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg. TERTIARY, used for the museum's opening on 17 December 1906, its founding director Theodor Volbehr, its architects and the naming of the Neustassfurt mine after Tobias von Elsner. Replace with the museum's own published history. - [23] Wikipedia, 'Nazi looting of artworks by Vincent van Gogh'. TERTIARY, checked to see whether this painting is treated anywhere as Nazi-looted; it states only that the Magdeburg picture is believed to have been destroyed by fire during the war. Replace with the Freie Universitaet Berlin confiscation inventory, cited above, which is the primary index. - [24] Tate, collection online, Francis Bacon, 'Study for Portrait of Van Gogh IV', 1957, accession T00226; page read 2026-09-26 and recording the work as not on display. Tate's expanded catalogue text did not render for this reader, so nothing beyond the artist, title, date, accession and display status is taken from it. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.