Peter Libbey of The NYT :
The 19th-century painter Edmund Walpole Brooke occupies a tiny, but durable place in art history. Not because of his own work, but because he offers a tantalising look into the tragic last days of Vincent van Gogh.
That the two shared something close to friendship during the weeks before van Gogh committed suicide in July 1890 was a noteworthy feat given van Gogh’s embrace of isolation during his stay in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village on the north-western outskirts of Paris.
But Brooke had grown up in Japan, a place that fascinated and inspired the Dutch painter. And so off they would go into the plein-air on painting excursions, their relationship chronicled in a few letters that have made Brooke an intriguing figure to a van Gogh scholar who is still struggling to understand what led him to put a bullet in his chest.
“He is a very enigmatic person,” Tsukasa Kodera, a curator and professor of art history at Osaka University in Japan, said of Brooke, who has become a focus of his research. “He might have received letters from van Gogh, he might have received drawings or paintings as a gift – they might have exchanged works.”
Kodera has spent the better part of a decade, with limited success, hunting for information about Brooke. He has visited his gravesite in Japan and found records to establish that Brooke’s work was included in exhibitions during his lifetime at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and at the 1891 Paris Salon, and was the subject of at least two solo shows in Japan.
But finding a painting by Brooke has stymied Kodera, at least until now, perhaps. In April, Katherine Mathews, a thrift store enthusiast, happened upon a watercolour with the signature E.W. Brooke while rummaging through Warehouse 839, a shop in Saco, Maine, that specializes in everything from estate furniture to odds and ends.
