PARIS (Reuters) – A Vincent Van Gogh painting of a Paris street scene was auctioned for 14 million euros ($ 16.47 million) at an auction on Thursday, only to be put back on the hammer and sold for a lower price.
Auction house Sotheby’s said there was a flaw in its online bidding system during the first sale of the painting, which had been in a private collection for more than a century.
The painting “Street scene in Montmartre” received the highest bid, for the second time, of 11.25 million euros. With costs, it was sold for 13.1 million euros.
This exceeded the 5 to 8 million euros that the auction house had estimated for the work, painted in 1887 while the artist was staying with his brother Theo in the French capital.
The auction took place in Paris with online or telephone bids from Paris, New York and Hong Kong.
The painting, which depicts a man and a woman walking arm in arm through a dilapidated fence with a windmill in the background, came from the collection of a French family.
It is part of a series produced by Van Gogh of scenes in Montmartre, a mountainous neighborhood in Paris now dominated by the Sacre Coeur church.
Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886 and left the city in 1888, saying that he was tired of his frantic pace of life.
He moved to the south of France, where he cut off part of his ear during an episode of mental illness. The artist later shot himself and died near Paris on July 29, 1890.
Reporting by Dominique Vidalon; Edition by Richard Lough and Janet Lawrence