Art authentication is a high-stakes pursuit. When orphaned artwork that has been lost or forgotten is found, it can fill in important pieces of the story of the artist, and sell at auction for tens, or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

But surprisingly, current techniques in art authentication are largely subjective. LMI believes that certainty of information is the bedrock of our collective cultural and artistic heritage. They’ve set out to authenticate artwork differently by using computational science and data to build on the expertise of art historians and provenance experts, so that nothing is lost to history.

LMI came to us with a request unlike any of our previous client partners: to develop technology that would measure, compare, and analyze painted letters as part of the authentication process for a work by one of the world’s most important artists – Vincent van Gogh.

Impressionist painters like van Gogh rarely signed their work, and rarely painted anything the same way twice. Could clues to this work's authenticity lie hidden in the enigmatic signature - Elimar?

This new and novel process resulted in robust, objective, and reliable data that contributed to LMI's formal report on their 4-year authentication process of Elimar.