Portrait of Dr. GachetThe Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece

“A unique and fascinating biography: the biography of a painting.” —Michiko Kakutani

This fascinating book reconstructs the painting’s journey and becomes a rich story of modernist art and the forces behind the art market. Masterfully evoked are the lives of the thirteen extraordinary people who owned the painting and shaped its history: avant-garde European collectors, pioneering dealers in Paris and Berlin, a brilliant medievalist who acquired it for one of Germany’s great museums, and a member of the Nazi elite who sold it after it had been confiscated as a work of “degenerate art.” Remarkable and riveting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet illuminates, in dramatic detail, the dynamics of the art market and of culture in our time.

Recipient of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award

Praise for Portrait of Dr. Gachet

“Ms. Saltzman has succeeded in giving us an understanding of van Gogh’s ascendant reputation, the shifting fortunes of modernist art and the headlong expansion of the art market.... A unique and fascinating biography: the biography of a painting.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“This is a rare and wonderful achievement—a scholarly thriller. With intellectual rigor and literary tact, with grace and tension, Cynthia Saltzman traces the fate of van Gogh’s famous last portrait.... Fascinating ... illuminating ... breathlessly suspenseful.”
—The Boston Globe

“This engrossing, moving book makes us think about the tangled relationship of economics, politics, and painting, and the unpredictable, dramatic life of a work of art, a separate life that begins and endures long after the death of the artist.”
—Francine Prose, Elle

“A brilliant idea for a book, executed wondrously.... Vivid art history. Saltzman offers an incisive survey of the previous century’s intellectual and economic cycles, as well as a savvy analysis of the art world and its politicking.... Marvelous.”
—Gerald Walker, The Washington Post Book World

“An extraordinary—at times almost incredible—tale.... Cynthia Saltzman tells the story vividly [and] concentrates, with equally fascinating results, on the haunting picture itself ... recals most impressively the entire van Gogh saga and illuminates brilliantly many of the curious events that have changed the nature of the art world over the last one hundred years.”
—Parade