On May 15, 1990, 700 people crowded into the auction room at Christie’s in New York.
When lot 21 came up, three or four competing parties swiftly brought the price to $40 million and then, according to then-Christie’s president and auctioneer Christopher Burge, the bidding continued “at a very stately pace” and rose “almost relentlessly” one million dollars at a time. When only one anonymous bidder was left, the crowd began to cheer.
Vincent Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold for a groundbreaking $82.5 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. (It would be unseated in 2008 by Francis Bacon’s “Triptych, 1976.”)
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Three days later, The New York Times announced the identity of the deep-pocketed buyer. Japanese businessman and art collector Ryoei Saito had fallen in love with the van Gogh masterpiece in 1988 when he saw it at at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When it came up for auction, he told his dealer that he “must have that painting, no matter what.”
Saito reportedly paid $33 million more than he had expected, but his quest was successful. Nearly 30 years later, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” has never been seen publicly again.
When we talk about missing art, most people think of tragic stories of theft and natural destruction that sweep notable masterpieces into purgatories of uncertainty. But there is another side to art that is considered “lost”—that of the whims of private ownership.
While many wealthy art collectors are responsible for endowing the great museums of the world with countless treasures, there is no obligation to make an important work of art available to the outside world after you have shelled out millions for it.
If you so choose, you can lock your new masterpiece away in a room for your eyes only or keep it boxed up in a warehouse beyond the eyes of art scholars and the public, waiting for the day that you can transform it back into cold hard cash. Van Gogh’s last portrait knows both these scenarios all too well.
“On completing the picture, van Gogh expressed his hope that after a century the portrait would seem to viewers to be an ‘apparition,’” writes art historian Cynthia Saltzman in Portrait of Dr. Gachet: the Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece. “But could he have imagined that the portrait’s ghostly quality would proceed from its momentary apparition on an auction stage, where it came and went like a flash of light?”
In May 1890, van Gogh decamped to a small village in northern France after checking himself out of an asylum in the south. He chose Auvers-sur-Oise partly to be near a local physician who was recommended to him by the artist Camille Pissarro and who specialized in both physical and psychological maladies.
Van Gogh’s hopes that the doctor would provide him with some relief from his relentless maladies were ultimately dashed; Dr. Gachet would prove to be no help. At the end of July, the 37-year-old artist would die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
But while the physician-patient relationship was unsuccessful, that of artist and sitter was the opposite.
At the beginning of June, van Gogh set up his canvas in Gachet’s home garden and began to paint the doctor. The portrait that materialized over the course of three days was profound. Gachet sits at a table with his head propped up in his right hand.
The background is a gradation of blues that shimmer with a vibrancy conveyed by van Gogh’s characteristic brushstrokes. Gachet’s piercing blue eyes stare straight at the view with a melancholic expression on his face. (Van Gogh made a second, less acclaimed version that he gifted to Gachet.)
The portrait was a reflection of its sitter who had his own issues (van Gogh once wrote that Dr. Gachet “is sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much”). But it is also a self-portrait. As Saltzman explains, “In linking his identity to that of the doctor, van Gogh suggests that the modern artist is not simply a tormented outsider but also a diagnostician of contemporary society, an analyst of its character, a critic of its injustices, diseases, and pathologies.”
In a letter to artist Paul Gauguin, van Gogh wrote, “I have a portrait of Dr. Gachet with the heartbroken expression of our time.”
After van Gogh’s death, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” along with the majority of his prolific oeuvre came under the ownership of his brother. But Theo’s untimely death only five months later left his widow with the job of protecting her brother-in-law’s body of work and doing everything she could to bolster his legacy, which at the time was nonexistent.
But as the years passed, interest in van Gogh’s work slowly began to grow, first in Denmark and the Netherlands, then in Germany, before finally working its way back around to France. Requests for exhibition loans of the portrait of Dr. Gachet increasingly came to Johanna van Gogh until early 1897 when the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard sold the painting to the artist and collector Alice Ruben for $58.
Over the next 14 years, the portrait changed hands several more times, exponentially increasing in price with each sale as van Gogh’s reputation continued to build.
In 1911, the painting landed at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt courtesy of a donation from a prominent local citizen that was orchestrated by the museum’s director, Georg Swarzenski.
It was a gutsy acquisition. In a foreshadowing of the Nazis’ degenerate art movement, Kaiser Wilhelm II championed the classics, and only the classics. He was not a fan of “modern” art, nor of anything that was coming out of France.
Despite this conservative streak, van Gogh found much more acclaim in Germany in the early 20th century than in France where he had spent much of his working life. It was the German dealers who were most successful selling his canvases and the German collectors who were eager to snap them up. The Städel Museum was not “Portrait of Dr. Gachet’s” first German owner, but the painting was the first Postimpressionist work of art to join the museum’s collection, which previously included exclusively the classics and Old Masters.
Despite the furor that accompanied the van Gogh’s initial arrival, it was given pride of place in the museum, which slowly became a champion of expressionist art and all things modern under the guidance of Swarzenski.
It was on the wall of the Städel that Dr. Gachet watched Germany declare war on France in the initial salvo of World War I, and the men of Frankfurt leave in mass to fight on the frontlines. It hung there in its gold frame as the country attempted to return to normal while coping with the tough strictures imposed after their defeat.
Gachet was there as the German government began to devolve in the early 1930s. But it was the Nazis’ rise to power that finally unseated the van Gogh portrait.
Beginning to sense what was in store for the country and for his beloved collection of modern art, Swarzenski removed many of the expressionist paintings from the museum’s walls in 1933 and stashed them away in a storage room under the roof, a room his assistant referred to as a “horror chamber” that was only opened “secretly to those who did not surrender to the Nazi doctrine.”
But the room didn’t stay hidden from the Nazis forever. As the degenerate art movement gained steam, the Nazis began to pillage the modern treasures of the Städel. “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” survived several rounds of purges, but in December 1937, the Städel was ordered by “the authority of the Führer” to ship Gachet to Berlin.
Swarzenski’s assistant described the experience of boxing the van Gogh up, writing, “As the carpenter drew an oil cloth over the picture the blue eyes of Gachet looked reproachfully at me. There was a funeral atmosphere.”
The Nazis’ issue with this particular portrait wasn’t entirely its status as “degenerate.” Rather, Hermann Göring realized, given the newfound prominence of van Gogh, that they could fetch a high price for one of his most well-regarded portraits. And they did.
It was sold to a German businessman in Amsterdam for what, according to Saltzman, would have been the equivalent of over half a million dollars in 1995. He turned around and sold it to a fellow business compatriot Siegfried Kramarsky, who took the portrait with him when his Jewish family had to flee the Netherlands ahead of the German invasion.
And that’s how van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” ended up in New York and on the walls of the Met, on loan from the Kramarsky family, when a Japanese businessman happened to stop by in 1988 and found himself struck by love.
For many years, it was not known what happened to the portrait after Saito took his new purchase to Japan, where he apparently put it in a storage facility where only he could enjoy it. Two years after the purchase, he fell into some financial and legal trouble and ended up in jail. Before he was put away, he made the disturbing comment that “When I die, I’m taking Gachet with me into the grave to be cremated with my ashes.”
In 1996, Saito died. When Gachet failed to turn up on the public art market, many worried that he had followed through with his threat.
But ahead of a new exhibition, Making Van Gogh, that opened at the end of October, the Städel Museum commissioned journalist Johannes Nichelmann to attempt to track down the portrait that was stolen away from the museum in 1937.
They were hoping to convince the current owner, if it had one, to send it on loan for the exhibit. While Nichelmann didn’t discover a name, he did get further than any other investigation in determining the portrait’s whereabouts.
In the gripping podcast Finding van Gogh, Nichelmann revealed that the Japanese bank responsible for disposing of Saito’s assets sold the portrait to Austrian financier Wolfgang Flöttl, who assembled an impressive collection of art that seemed to be entirely for investment purposes. The canvases remained boxed up and stored away out of view of even their owner.
But Flöttl, too, had his share of legal difficulties and he was eventually forced to sell off his art acquisitions. The new owner is believed to have been a secretive Italian man who lived in Switzerland.
In the years since this anonymous collector gained possession of the van Gogh, he has died and his family, who similarly has no interest in going public, now owns the canvas.
While it is impossible to know if “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” will ever again be seen by the public, there is hope that one day the world will have access to this important work of art, and that it will take its place back on a museum wall where it can be appreciated, studied, and enjoyed by all.
Until then, the portrait’s original gold frame, now empty, hangs in the Städel Museum, a reminder of the van Gogh work once prized so dearly by the people of Frankfurt.
