The Rare Van Gogh Print Hidden from the World in Wartime Iran

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art holds Iran's only Van Gogh, a rare 1882 lithograph titled At Eternity's Gate, one of just seven known prints, depicting an elderly resident of The Hague named Adrianus Zuyderland who was aged 72 at the time yet lived to 87.

Van Gogh first gave the print to the Dutch artist Anton van Rappard, and it later passed through US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and his wife Mary before reaching the New York dealer Eugene Thaw.

In 1975, Farah Pahlavi, wife of the Shah of Iran, bought it for 65,000 dollars, and it entered the Tehran museum's collection when the institution opened in 1977.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the work has spent most of its time locked away in the museum's storeroom rather than on public view.

The museum reopened in May 2026 after recent military strikes in Tehran, displaying only about six works so staff could remove them quickly if hostilities resumed.

Van Gogh later reworked the same mournful image as a colored painting in 1890, a canvas now housed at a museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands.

Iran has held one of art's stranger trophies since 1975, when Farah Pahlavi paid $65,000 for an 1882 Van Gogh lithograph once owned by Nelson Rockefeller, one of only seven surviving impressions The Art Newspaper. It depicts Adrianus Zuyderland, a Hague pensioner of 72, and traveled from the artist's hand to painter Anton van Rappard before crossing the Atlantic. Now it rests in a Tehran vault holding a Western collection valued near $3 billion that Iranians rarely see the BBC. The museum reopened in May with works hung for rapid removal if fighting returns, and the Van Gogh shows only while the ceasefire lasts.