Van Gogh drawing set to fetch up to $10m at auction 

'La Mousmé', a portrait of a young Provençal girl by Vincent van Gogh

A Vincent van Gogh drawing is expected to sell for up to $10 million (£7m) at an auction in New York next month, which could make it the most expensive drawing by the famed 19th century Dutch painter ever sold at auction.

La Mousmé, a reed-pen portrait of a local girl drawn in 1888 while the artist was staying in the southern French town of Arles, is estimated to fetch between $7 and $10 million.

Two van Gogh drawings have been sold for over $1 million, including Garden of Flowers, an ink image of summer fields sold for $8.36 million in 1990. His paintings, however, have fetched up to $80 million.

"The figure interests me much more than the landscape. To do studies of figures, to attempt them and to learn would still after all be the shortest route for me to do something of value," he wrote to his brother, Theo, in the summer of 1888.

Van Gogh had been painting landscapes of golden wheat fields in Provence when he was interrupted by torrential rains, leaving him confined in his studio for weeks.

It is then he is believed to have turned to portraits. That summer, he painted two oils and a drawing of a French-Algerian soldier, known as Le Zouave, and La Mousmé.

The Mousmé painting depicts a young, dark-haired girl wearing a striped bodice and a spotted skirt, holding a branch of oleander in her hand. Van Gogh then made a reed-pen drawing of the same name based on the initial painting, which is due to be sold in March by Christie’s auction house.

"La Mousmé ranks among the greatest works on paper of the artist’s career. Technically innovative with an astonishingly diverse and perceptive range of strokes, lines, and dots," Christie’s wrote in the lot’s description.

It encapsulates "the various preoccupations of van Gogh’s art at this defining moment of his career – his pursuit of the modern portrait, his quest to realise the influence of Japonisme, as well as developing his graphic output," it added.

In 1990, Portrait of Dr Gachet became the most expensive van Gogh painting ever sold at auction with a final price of $82.5 million.

La Mousmé was inspired by a popular novel at the time, Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti, which tells the story of a naval officer who married a Japanese woman while stationed in the country. The title, mousmé, is a term for a young Japanese woman taken from the book.

"Now, if you know what a mousmé is (you’ll know when you’ve read Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème), I’ve just painted one. It took me my whole week, I wasn’t able to do anything else, having been not too well again. That’s what annoys me, if I’d been well I’d have knocked off some more landscapes in between times. But in order to finish off my mousmé I had to save my mental powers," he wrote to his brother.