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The search for Van Gogh’s lost $400 million masterpiece
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People viewing 'Self-Portrait, Saint-Remy, first week of September 1889' by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gough at the Courtauld Gallery in London, February 2022.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
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 US$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 US$300 million (S$400 million), or more, experts say.
