A Van Gogh Mystery: Pathways of Nordic Art and Literature in the 1880s

media release: In 2016, a painting of a fisherman turned up at a garage sale in Minnetonka, Minnesota. Today, that painting is thought to be a lost Van Gogh valued at $15 million. Join us on Saturday, May 3, at 11:00am in 19 Ingraham Hall as Professor Susan Brantly discusses her work helping to navigate the literary and artistic connections between Denmark, the Netherlands, and France of a Van Gogh painting purchased for a dollar at a garage sale in Minnesota. 

Susan Brantly is professor of Scandinavian Studies and director of the Bradley Learning Community at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

She is a specialist in Swedish language and literature. Her books include The Life and Writings of Laura Marholm and Understanding Isak Dinesen and she co-edited The Nordic Storyteller: Essays in Honour of Niels Ingwersen. Her most recent book is titled The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era. Contemporary Swedish historical fiction remains a central research interest, and she has published articles on writers such as P.C. Jersild, Sven Delblanc, Sara Lidman, Per Anders Fogelström, P.O. Enquist and others in journals such as, Clio, Comparative Literature, Scandinavian Studies, Horizont. She has also published on August Strindberg and other nineteenth-century Nordic writers, and she maintains a keen interest in modernist studies. She was the editor of the journal Scandinavian Studies from 2012 to 2023.