The Red Vineyards near Arles is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, executed on a privately primed Toile de 30 piece of burlap in early November 1888. It supposedly is the only piece sold by the artist while he was alive.

The Red Vineyard was exhibited for the first time at the annual exhibition of Les XX, 1890 in Brussels, and sold for 400 Francs (equal to about $1,000-1,050 today) to Anna Boch, an impressionist painter, member of Les XX and art collector from Belgium. Anna was the sister of Eugène Boch, another impressionist painter and a friend of Van Gogh, who had painted Boch's portrait (Le Peintre aux Étoiles) in Arles, in autumn 1888. It was acquired by the famous Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, was then nationalised by the Bolsheviks with the rest of his collection, which eventually passed to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Of course, bearing in mind that van Gogh didn't start painting until he was twenty-seven years old, and died when he was thirty-seven, it would not be unremarkable that he did not sell many. Furthermore, the paintings that were to become famous were the ones produced after he went to Arles, France in 1888, only two years before he died.

More Info: en.wikipedia.org