A $400m Van Gogh Gone With Nary a Trace

The painting, done only weeks before the artist'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 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.

For much of the 20th century, Portrait Of Dr Gachet was prominently displayed at the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, 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 became one of the art world's greatest mysteries.

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

Art sleuths over the years have confirmed this much: that the Japanese buyer from 1990 was soon undone by scandal. His collection was sold by a bank and the painting was acquired by an Austrian financier, who soon found that he, too, could not afford to keep it.

In 1998, the painting was sold privately to an undisclosed party. Since then, the trail has run cold.

While the art market thrives on secrecy and protects privacy as a matter of honor, it also employs people whose mission is to collect reliable information on who owns what. Some are auction house representatives; others are art advisers or dealers who have made a specific genre their special niche.