The painting is signed "Elimar" in its bottom right corner. LMI Group International, Inc.During Vincent van Goghs year-long stay in a French asylum, he created some 150 paintingsincludingIrises andThe Starry Night. He also painted many interpretations of other artists work, calling them translations. As van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, he was not copying pure and simple but rather translating into another language, the one of colors, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black.Now, experts say theyve identified a long-lost van Gogh translation: an oil portrait of a red-cheeked fisherman, which an antiques collector purchased at a garage sale in Minnesota for under $50.The collector sold the piece to the art research firm LMI Group International for an undisclosed amount in 2019. Since then, the companys researchers have been investigating the painting, and they recently released a 450-pagereport detailing their conclusion: Its a van Gogh. Vincent van Gogh'sThe Reaper, an interpretation of Jean-Franois Millet's drawing of the same name Van Gogh Museum, AmsterdamWhen art historian Maxwell L. Anderson, chief operating officer of LMI Group, first laid eyes on the painting, he was struck by what [he] saw, as he tells the Wall Street Journals Kelly Crow. Was I all in? No, he adds. But I was super intrigued.At the garage sale, the collector had been intrigued by the paintings impasto, a technique involving thickly laid paint. The 18-inch-tall portrait depicts a white-bearded man by the sea who is smoking a pipe and repairing a fishing net. His downcast eyes betray contemplation, and his face is marked by ruddy coloring and deep smile lines. In the works bottom right corner is a signature: the word Elimar.Though the piece lacked van Goghs famously vivid colors, Anderson saw telltale signs of a deft painter at play, per the Wall Street Journal. He also noticed a hair embedded in the brushwork.In its analysis of Elimar, LMI Group combined science and technology with traditional tools of connoisseurship, historical context, formal analysis and provenance research, as chairman, president and CEO Lawrence M. Shindell says in a statement.The company hired Jennifer Mass, president of Scientific Analysis of Fine Art, to analyze the canvas fibers and pigments. One particular redgeranium lake, or PR-50introduced doubts. Van Gogh died by suicide in 1890, and researchers have always thought geranium lake was first patented around 1905.Mass brought in patent lawyerBen Appleton to search for an earlier patent. After a month of research, his firm found an 1883 patent for PR-50a find-within-a-find for conservators, who can now date and authenticate works containing this red pigment to the late 19th century, writes the Wall Street Journal. The letters of the "Elimar" inscription matched those of "Emile Zola" in van Gogh's paintingStill Life With Bible(1885). OddCommonA genetic analysis of the hair embedded in the painting revealed that it had belonged to someone with red or red-brown hair. As van Goghs 35self-portraits illustrate, the artist had ginger locks. Additionally, researchers found that the letters in the paintings Elimar inscriptionparticularly the Es, Ms and Asmatch those in an 1885 van Gogh painting.Van Gogh regularly neglected to sign his paintings, but why mark this one Elimar? According to LMI Group, Elimar is the name of a character in the 1848 Danish novelThe Two Baronesses by Hans Christian Andersenone of van Goghsfavorite authors.According to the report, van Gogh painted Elimar in 1889, during his first year at the sanitarium in southern France. Experts think Elimar is a so-called translation of Danish artistMichael Anchers portrait of fishermanNiels Gaihede, a subject to which both [painter Paul] Gauguin and van Gogh were drawn, per the statement.As soon as we saw the Ancher, I knew we were right, art historian and LMI Group researcher William Havlicek tells the Wall Street Journal. Experts thinkElimar was inspired byMichael Anchers portrait of fisherman Niels Gaihede. LMI Group International, Inc.The analysis has provided fresh insight into the oeuvre of van Gogh, particularly as it relates to his practice of reinterpreting works by other artists, Anderson says in the statement. He thinks Elimar is a form of spiritual self-portrait, allowing viewers to see the painter as he wished to be remembered.LMI Group will soon begin showing Elimar to major van Gogh scholars and dealers. They think the artwork is worth at least $15 million. Still, the paintings authorship is not yet widely accepted, and art experts are generally hesitant to draw conclusions about newly discovered works authenticity.People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be wonderful if they found a van Gogh, Richard Polsky, an art authenticator who wasnt involved in the project, tells the Wall Street Journal. But theyve got to pin everything down and get a scholar at theVan Gogh Museum [in Amsterdam] to sign off on it.The Van Gogh Museum has seen the painting before. The anonymous buyer submitted it to the museum in 2019, and experts ruled that it wasnt the real deal. However, the museum hasnt yet responded to the new report.At the end of the day, the most important thing is what the experts in Van Gogh think of the artwork, Robert Snell, co-owner and fine arts specialist at Revere Auctions in St. Paul, tells KAREs Kent Erdahl.Snell is particularly interested in the paintings provenance. Trying to figure out how that piece ended up at a garage sale in Minneapolis is really the $15 million mystery, he adds.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.