Van Gogh landscape sells for €7m at French auction

An early landscape painting by Vincent Van Gogh has sold for €7m (£6.2m; $8.3m) at an auction in Paris. Painted in 1882, when Van Gogh was 29-years-old, "Fishing Net Menders in the Dunes" depicts peasant women working on the land under a cloudy sky. It was the only landscape Van Gogh painted at the time and was inspired by the countryside around The Hague, where he passed a short but formative period. The painting was bought by an American collector after bidding war that pushed the price above its estimate of €3m-€5m. The former owner was a European collector who had lent the work to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for eight years until 2015. The painting is the first Van Gogh to be auctioned in France for more than 20 years.