The Search for van Gogh’s Lost Masterpiece

Cast off by the Nazis, but heralded by curators, the artist’s painting of his doctor, made just before van Gogh’s suicide, has not been seen in 34 years.

When the hammer fell at Christie’s in Manhattan on May 15, 1990, a Vincent van Gogh painting, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” set the record at the time for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, going to a Japanese paper magnate for $82.5 million.

Painted in the garden of the artist’s physician in June 1890, it was completed just weeks before van Gogh’s suicide by gunshot. The sense of melancholy radiating from the doctor conveys, van Gogh wrote to his friend Paul Gauguin, the “heartbroken expression of our time.” Considered to be among his masterpieces, it may now be worth $300 million, or more, experts say.

For much of the 20th century, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” was prominently displayed at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to which it was lent by a private collector before the 1990 sale.

But it has all but disappeared since that day at Christie’s, and its whereabouts have become one of the art world’s greatest mysteries.

Curators putting together van Gogh shows have thrown up their hands at finding it. The Städel Museum, where it once hung, commissioned an entire podcast designed to ferret out its location.