Portrait of Dr. Gachet
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| Portrait of Dr. Gachet (first version) |
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| Vincent van Gogh , 1890 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 68 × 57 cm |
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| Portrait of Dr. Gachet (Second Version) |
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| Vincent van Gogh , 1890 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 68 × 57 cm |
| Musée d'Orsay |
As a “ Portrait of Dr. Gachet ”is the name of two paintings by Vincent van Gogh , which he painted in 1890, a few weeks before his suicide . They show the doctor Paul-Ferdinand Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris ; the two picture titles are after him. In Dutch they are called Portret van Dr. Gachet , in French Portrait du docteur Gachet (première et seconde version) or Le docteur Paul Gachet (based on the catalog of the Musée d'Orsay ). Van Gogh was inspired by Eugène Delacroix 's painting of Torquato Tasso for this work . He couldn't sell them even in his lifetime. Their origin is proven in the respective estate.
Description and interpretation
The two picture versions are easy to distinguish in terms of color and style. What they have in common, however, are essential elements of the composition: the seated Doctor Gachet melancholy supports his head with one hand, the second lies on a red table that picks up the bright color of his hair again. A thimble , which is positioned similarly in both paintings, but in the first variant is in a vase, in the second is loosely on the table, can be seen as an attribute of medical training gachets. The two books depicted in the first version - Manette Salomon and Germinie Lacerteux , two novels by the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt - are missing in the later painting. The color effect is determined by the ultramarine blue of the clothes and the background, corresponding to the dominant color of his last self-portraits .
Ingredients of the thimble are still used to treat cardiovascular diseases. A commonly reported side effect is seeing asterisks and amplification of the color yellow. The hypothesis that medication with a thimble could have influenced Van Gogh's view and depiction of his environment can be found in many of his pictures.
Van Gogh saw in Gachet his external and internal double. He saw him as at least as sick as himself, which is why he doubted that he could seriously help him, but also felt particularly connected to him and saw him as a close friend after a very short time. The portrait is thus also a self-portrait, even more comprehensive, as van Gogh himself put it in a letter to Paul Gauguin , “the affected facial expression of our time”.
Provenance
After the painter's death, the first version of the painting came into the possession of his brother, Theo van Gogh . His widow later sold it to a Danish collector for 300 francs. In the winter of 1910/11 it was part of Roger Fry's Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition at Grafton Galleries, London. In 1912 Georg Swarzenski was able to acquire the painting for the Frankfurt Städel with financial help from Councilor Viktor Mössinger . In 1937 the picture was confiscated by the National Socialists as what they called “ degenerate art ”. The picture then ended up in the collection of Hermann Göring , who, together with van Gogh's garden in Daubigny and a bridge landscape by Paul Cézanne, sold it to the Amsterdam banker Franz Koenigs for half a million Reichsmarks .
Before the Second World War, the painting came into the possession of the German-American collector Siegfried Kramarsky , whose heirs had it auctioned on May 15, 1990 at Christie's auction house in New York . The buyer was the Japanese entrepreneur Saitō Ryōei , who paid $ 82.5 million for the painting. It is one of the most expensive selling paintings and has changed hands thirteen times so far.
Since then, the picture has never been shown publicly again. After Saito, honorary president of the Japanese paper company Dai Showa, who died in 1996, acquired the picture, he is said to have said: "Put the picture in my coffin when I die." The condition and location of the picture are currently unknown.
A Podcast from the Städel Museum is dedicated to the search for the image. The production was nominated for the Grimme Online Award 2020.
A second version of the painting came into French state ownership as a bequest from Paul Gachet and is on display in the Musée d'Orsay .
See also
literature
- Cynthia Saltzman: The Portrait of Dr. Gachet. Biography of a masterpiece. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-458-34577-9
- Jean Starobinski: Une mélancolie moderne. Le portrait du docteur Gachet by Vincent van Gogh . In: Médicine et Hygiène 182, April 10, 1991, pp. 75-81.
Web links
- Portrait of Doctor Gachet : provenance and exhibitions of the first version
- [1] SZ from May 10, 2010: Another van Gogh? Vincent van Gogh's last picture?
Individual evidence
- ↑ E. Ritz, W. Schoner: From Digitalis purpurea to the toad skin . In: DMW - German Medical Weekly . thieme-connect.com. 2008. Retrieved February 18, 2020.
- ↑ Podcast Finding van Gogh , staedelmuseum.de, accessed on May 2, 2020