This year welcomes the first new pen series designed by Marco Tomasetta, Montblanc’s most recently inaugurated artistic director. Tomasetta wanted to start with the fundamentals, and chose Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh as a lead-off subject for his first collection.

The line is called ‘Masters of Art’; it follows the company’s successful ‘Patron of Art’ line, which included homages to Luciano Pavarotti and Peggy Guggenheim, among others. The Van Gogh series includes five collections of writing instruments.

As always, the firm’s estimable ‘distillation’ process creates signature pens that sum up historically significant figures as iconic styles. Each uses signature works, relevant places, symbols of incident and other signifiers to build a useful abstraction that’s a guaranteed ice-breaker. One series uses ‘Sunflowers’ as a foundation; another the painter’s ‘The Harvest’. The Van Gogh series at its most limited is ‘Wheatfield with Crows’; that one’s priced at $168,000. Materials used in the Van Gogh collection include 18-karat gold, along with diamonds, sapphires, platinum, and rhodium.

The Van Gogh collection is apparently the first in Montblanc’s Masters of Art line. Upcoming collections will look at artists from different schools, eras and movements.