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Van der Most’s plan was coming together as he’d hoped. Van der Most had an artwork, and Al-Harasani, it seemed, had an artist. The fake Diriyah Starry Night was now his the Saudi Gazette report made real. Van der Most crouched by the case, took out a brush and, in the bottom left corner of a multimillion-pound artwork he didn’t make, slowly marked out four letters in black paint: MOST. Van der Most broke his gaze from the painting and took a breath: “So can I sign?” The physicality of the work was finally apparent, the grooves of the brush strokes and the crests and valleys of the thick oil paint. The deep blues and swirling colours filled the room. The painting he had travelled across the world to see lay there, resplendent. The case was a nice touch, Van der Most thought, as he unclipped the gold catches and lifted the lid. There was a large black suitcase on the floor. After a long dinner, they were finally invited to a room upstairs. The following evening, Van der Most told me, he and Boon arrived at Al-Harasani’s villa. “I was like, what the fuck is this? Is he bullshitting? Is this actually going to happen?” But, as he told me, he was “exploding” inside.
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Van der Most nodded along, playing it cool. “Or any idea whether we would hear from Meshal.” But soon after their arrival, the pair were swept up in a gleaming Cadillac and taken to meet Al-Harasani at his office. “We had no real plans,” said Van der Most. As he stepped off the plane, the hot, dry air transported him back to his childhood living in Oman, where his father worked for an oil company. On 31 October 2021, Van der Most flew to Jeddah, with Boon in tow. Al-Harasani had seemed interested in Boon writing an article about the painting, but when it became apparent this was not going to happen immediately, the conversation trailed off – until, some months later, when Van der Most received an invitation to speak at a conference in Saudi Arabia. It was never collected from the depot a month later it arrived back in the Netherlands.
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In return, Van der Most sent Al-Harasani an AI-based artwork of a bunch of flowers, Arabian Bloom. Weeks later, a picture frame – glass smashed – arrived, containing a black and white photo of Diriyah. As if to smooth things over, Al-Harasani said the princess wanted to send Boon a gift. Al-Harasani said that the artist was a Dutch man named “Jeroen” – perhaps not Van der Most after all. According to Boon, over WhatsApp, Al-Harasani explained he was managing communications about the painting, which was owned by a friend of his. His name was Dr Meshal Al-Harasani.īoon, the Dutch journalist, who has a cheerful demeanour and a nose for oddball stories, struck up a correspondence with Al-Harasani. She was happy to share the contact details of the client who had commissioned the shoot. The photographer, Nouf Yarub knew nothing about its origins, but could confirm that there was, in fact, a painting. One night, scrolling through Instagram photos tagged #diriyah, Boon found a post of the very same photograph of the Diriyah Starry Night. He contacted a Dutch journalist, Lex Boon, to help him with his inquiry. “The writer of the article was not aware that the painting did not exist,” Alberda told me over email.īut did the painting exist? Van der Most still couldn’t say. Janet Alberda, the Dutch ambassador to Saudi Arabia, paid a visit in person to the Saudi Gazette and the article was quickly updated, removing all reference to Van der Most.
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The embassy said they would look into it. He sent the embassy a LinkedIn post he had written about his confusion. “Have you seen this painting in real life?” Van der Most replied. Was the story a mistake? Clickbait? A scam?Ī few days later, Van der Most was tagged on Twitter by the Dutch Embassy in Saudi Arabia, which proudly shared the Gazette story. He had even used Van Gogh’s Starry Night as a basis for a previous work, an homage to the partially destroyed Christchurch cathedral in New Zealand, constructed using tweets about the 2011 earthquake. Classic works, hacked and spliced using computers and code. He reaches into the past to create familiar, yet unknown images. Van der Most wallows in an art-history uncanny valley. But what made his spine tingle was that he was the sort of artist that could have. He had definitely not been paid £2.5 million for it. He hadn’t created the Diriyah Starry Night. The result, the artist was quoted as saying, was an artwork “between what I saw and what Van Gogh saw in a different place and time.” Peering through the window of a mud house, the artist recalled the story of Van Gogh’s work and was compelled to start drawing Diriyah “in a sky full of stars”. According to the report, Van der Most had found inspiration during a visit to Diriyah.