What’s worse? The incredible bogus drawbridge of Vincent Van Gogh – or his own bogus buggy?

With this blog I would like to bring a true mystery to the attention of the art world – showing that one of the all time masters of art was, in fact, a con man.

First things first: this is the famous artist Vincent Van Gogh,

He lived in the south of France, and he made a number of paintings of tiny, almost microscopic horse-and-buggy on a mammoth drawbridge, just outside of the city of Arles:

He did this paintings in the late 1800’s.  Sadly, the Germans destroyed this bridge, along with many others, during World War II.  But thankfully for tourists, a “bogus drawbridge” has been built to take its place. It is NOT easy to reach – well off the beaten path – so if you ever get here chances are, you’ll be the only one here to be looking at it!

But now we get to the fun bit – unless you are an art historian, in which you might find my opinion on this to be offensive if not downright hypostasy.

If you compare the tiny size of this bogus bridge to that of the monster size drawbridge in his paintings, Van Gogh has grossly overestimated the size of the bridge – or else grossly underestimated the size of the horse-and-buggy crossing it. In both cases he made a gross error – and I find it amazing the public has not spotted this egregious error until now!