As of today, the painting entitled Watermill at Kollen by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) can be viewed at Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch. Exactly one month ago, the museum purchased the painting at the Impressionist & Modern Art Sale at Sotheby’s in New York for almost 3 million Euros (a hammer price of 2.6 million dollars). Van Gogh painted the watermill in May of 1884 during his 2-year stay in Nuenen. To celebrate the acquisition, Het Noordbrabants Museum will be opening its doors for free to the public on Saturday 16th December from 11am until 5pm. Also on this day, the Collse Watermolen (the watermill at Kollen) in Eindhoven will be free for visitors to enter between 9.30am and 12.30pm, as will the Vincentre in Neunen between 10am and 10pm. This is Het Noordbrabants Museum’s most important acquisition to date and reflects the museum’s aim of offering a representative overview of Van Gogh’s Brabant period by m

Scientists from UCLA and the National Gallery of Art have used a combination of three advanced imaging techniques to produce a highly detailed analysis of a second century Egyptian painting. They are the first to use the specific combination — which they termed “macroscale multimodal chemical imaging” — to examine an ancient work of art. The new technique enabled them to learn about the raw materials the artist used, and the order in which they were applied to the painting, and it uncovered insights about the painting’s connections to other work from the same era. The approach, which is described in a paper published in Scientific Reports, integrates three existing techniques — hyperspectral diffuse reflectance, luminescence and X-ray fluorescence — to examine the painting. The concept is a high-tech version of what might happen if one were to analyze an everyday object with, say, the naked eye, an X

The most complete skeleton ever found of an australopithecus, a forerunner to modern man, went on display for the first time in Johannesburg on Wednesday following a 20-year process to excavate and assemble the 3.67 million-year-old remains. Known as “Little Foot” because four small foot bones were the first to be discovered, the skeleton is the most complete example of a human ancestor older than 1.5 million years yet discovered. It will now be available for public viewing at Wits University in Johannesburg. “This is one of the most remarkable fossil discoveries made in the history of human origins research and it is a privilege to unveil a finding of this importance today,” said Ron Clarke, the Wits University academic who discovered Little Foot.