It was Britain's second exhibition devoted exclusively to the work of Vincent van Gogh and it took place in Oxford. Yet, curiously, very little is know about the Oxford Arts Club show, held between May 7 and June 2, 1924, at Barnett House, on the corner of Broad Street and the Turl. Ironically, this became the site years later (following rebuilding) of Blackwell's Art Shop, where some of the very pictures that had been displayed unknown and probably unappreciated at the time are now offered in various publications as iconic images of 20th-century art.

All that is known about the show is a list of the works displayed and the names of the lenders. It comes in the form of a one-page 'catalogue' discovered in the archives of the Ashmolean Museum, by Dr Jon Whiteley, a keeper in the Western Art department. Without it, no one would now know about "an important event as art historian Martin Bailey has described it not previously recorded in the literature".

The discovery was made in time for the catalogue to be included in the not-to-be-missed exhibition Van Gogh and Britain: Pioneer Collectors, curated by Mr Bailey, which continues until June 18 at Compton Verney, in the Warwickshire countryside north of Banbury. Staff there kindly supplied me with the photograph of it, which you can see at the top of this page. I hope it proves legible it was taken through the glass of a sealed display case.

I said a moment ago that the catalogue carried the names of the lenders. In fact, the principal lender is described only as "a member of the club", a form of words that cloaked the identity pretty thinly at the time, I would guess of Sir Michael Sadler, a Barnsley-born educationalist who was Master of University College between 1923 and 1934. He became a serious collector of modern art in 1909 and acquired works by, among others, Gauguin, Czanne, Klee and Kandinsky. The paintings he showed at Barnett House were the glorious Oleanders, painted in Arles in August 1888, which he bought at London's Lefevre Gallery in October 1923 but appears to have sold back within two years (did he go off it?), and the slightly later Olive Trees, painted just outside the asylum at St-Remy in the autumn of 1889, which he bought, along with three drawings, at Van Gogh's first one-man show in Britain at London's Leicester Galleries in December 1923. Sir Michael wrote the introduction to the catalogue for this exhibition, calling Van Gogh "one of the three master painters whose work has had a seminal power in recent European art". (The others were Czanne and Gauguin.) Both of Sadler's Van Gogh paintings (but not his drawings) are at Compton Verney. At the press day a month or so back, I persuaded the owner of the house, Sir Peter Moores like Sadler, a noted (and knighted) art connoisseur from the North of England to pose for me beside the second work . This is possibly the first time he has been 'snapped' with a Boots disposable camera.

The other collector prominently featured in the Oxford show was the Dutch-born stockbroker Frank Stoop (1863-1933) who moved to London in the early 1890s. His collection, which he bequeathed to the Tate Gallery, also featured work by Czanne, Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani. The four pictures shown at Barnett House are all at Compton Verney: Farms Near Auvers (formerly Hamlet in the hills), The Oise at Auvers (formerly Factory in fields), Thatched Roofs (formerly Village in winter landscape) and A Corner of the Garden of St Paul's Hospital at St-Remy ( formerly The sheltered steading). The first of these has a special poignancy which might not have been realised by the Oxonians who saw it in 1924, before the sad circumstances of Van Gogh's life became widely known (chiefly through Irving Stone's Lust for Life, published in Britain in 1934). It was painted between late May and July 1890 and shows the wheatfields where he was to shoot himself on July 28, 1890, causing injuries from which he died two days later.

The other work from the Oxford show that now features at Compton Verney is notable for another reason. Wild flowers, bought in 1923 by the Scottish tallow dealer Sir James Murray, was discovered soon after he sold it in 1927 the first 'Van Gogh' painting to be auctioned in Britain not to have been by Van Gogh at all. Still Life with Daises and Poppies is now attributed to an Unknown Artist.

I had hoped Martin Bailey had also hoped that I might have found information on the Oxford Arts Club show (a review perhaps) in The Oxford Times of the day. Alas, it appears not to have been covered. Other publications, which Dr Malcolm Graham kindly looked at for me in the Oxfordshire library's local history collections, are also silent on the subject. So does anyone out there know anything more about it? If so, I would love to hear from you.