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“It was romantic…the sun was pouring its very yellow rays over the bushes and the ground, absolutely a shower of gold.”

But then Vincent confessed that the painting was “well below what I’d wished to do,” and later he sent it to Theo to keep.

Museum director Axel Rueger, at an unveiling ceremony in the museum, described the discovery as a “once-in-a-lifetime experience”.

“This is a great painting from what many see as the high point of his artistic achievement, his period in Arles, in southern France,” he said. “In the same period he painted works such as `Sunflowers,’ `The Yellow House’ and `The Bedroom’.”

Van Gogh struggled with bouts of mental distress throughout his life, and died of a self-inflicted gun wound in 1890. He sold only one painting while he was alive, though his work was just beginning to win acclaim when he died.

According to a reconstruction published in The Burlington Magazine by three researchers, the painting was recorded as number 180 in Theo’s collection, and given the title “Sun Setting at Arles.” It was sold to French art dealer Maurice Fabre in 1901.

Fabre never recorded selling the work, and the painting disappeared from history until it reappeared in 1970 in the estate of Norwegian industrialist Christian Nicolai Mustad.

The Mustad family said that Christian had purchased the work in 1908 as a young man in one of his first forays into art collecting, but he had soon after been told by the French ambassador to Sweden that it was a fake. Embarrassed, Mustad banished it to the attic.