Art patron Walter Annenberg has given the Metropolitan Museum a major landscape by Vincent Van Gogh, "Wheat Field With Cypresses," after purchasing it for $57 million from the family of Swiss industrialist Emil Buhrle, who died in 1956.
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Annenberg acknowledges it was the most he ever paid for a work of art. "When I heard that there was a possibility it was available, I talked to the Met people because I thought it was something the museum must have," Anne-berg said.The former ambassador to Britain whose fortune comes from publishing already has promised to bequeath his entire collection of more than 50 Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings to the Met, where they will go on display this fall.