The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market [Hardcover]

A globetrotting Gold Rush heiress. An awkward Paris schoolmaster. A celebrated French actor. And a museum of history and art in Californias Central Valley. What do they have in common? They are all connected by an oil painting, a still life calledFlowers and Fruit, that may or may not have been painted by the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin.

In the decade that museums began to collect modern art,Flowers and Fruittraveled the art market in Paris and New York. Experts and connoisseurs hailed it as a signature work of Gauguin just as he came to be acknowledged as a master. When it joined the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, locals treasured it as the Museums Gauguin.

But by 1964, Gauguin scholars and experts in Paris and New York had lost track of the painting and declared it lost. When it resurfaced in 2018, they questioned its authenticity. How could a genuine Gauguin have been hiding in plain sight in a provincial American museum?

IsFlowers and Fruita forgery or is it authentic? Follow along as historian, curator, and professor of museum studies Dr. Stephanie Brown traces the unlikely history of the painting. Using never-before-seen archives and making new connections, Brown writes the biography of a paintingand explores what we mean by authenticity and who gets to define it.

Now undergoing technical examination as a result of Dr. Browns findings,Flowers and Fruithas embarked on a new chapter of its life. If the painting is authentic, it will be the most valuable painting in the Haggins collectionand one of the most important paintings in California. And if the painting is a forgery, who was the forger?