The Van Gogh Deception

Throughout the course of his life, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) created more than 2,000 works of art, including an estimated 900 paintings.

He also wrote over 2,000 letters, with 651 of them addressed to his brother, Theo (“5 Things You Need to Know About Van Gogh’s Letters.” Van Gogh Museum). Theo encouraged and financially supported his older brother’s art career, and the two lived together briefly in Paris. Some of van Gogh’s most famous works are The Starry Night, Sunflowers, and Irises. In 2022, his painting Orchard with Cypresses sold for $117.2 million.

In The Van Gogh Deception, Art’s father, Art Hamilton Sr., is an authenticator who confirms that a van Gogh painting is a forgery. The novel’s premise is not far removed from history, as one of the most well-known cases of van Gogh forgeries involved Otto Wacker, an art dealer, who was found guilty of fraud in 1932 for 33 fake paintings. According to scholar Walter Feilchenfeldt, whose father exposed the scandal, Wacker had the paintings’ authenticity certified by experts but was not able to provide the records of its provenance (from whom and from where the work came). Wacker claimed a Russian buyer originally owned the works, but the van Gogh estate had no records of the sale. At the time, van Gogh pieces were in high demand in Berlin, and many buyers and experts were eager to accept a new acquisition of van Gogh paintings.

Feilchenfeldt describes three types of van Gogh forgeries: 1) intentionally deceptive works; 2) wrongly attributed works found at Theo’s residence; and 3) works found at Theo’s residence and falsely signed as “Vincent” (Feilchenfeldt, Walter. “Van Gogh Fakes: The Wacker Affair.” Simiolos, 1989). Feilchenfeldt explains that one of the details art experts research to authenticate a van Gogh painting involves verifying that the work is on a French canvas and that the surface is shiny without cracks (Feilchenfeldt 298-99).

In the novel, Hamilton verifies the painting’s surface, the pigment’s chemical make-up, and the provenance. The canvas is even French, but Hicks adds the twist of the canvas belonging to a different artist, thereby proving that the forger repurposed an old canvas. Hamilton explains to his son that sometimes potential forgeries are not pursued because art collectors and art experts want to save their reputations. During the Wacker Affair, many art experts and academics could not agree on which paintings were forged and which were authentic. Some retracted their claims of authenticity, while others used x-rays that were themselves based on forgeries (Feilchenfeldt 295).

In his Author’s Note, Hicks, who has a bachelor of arts in painting, describes the background story of the van Gogh painting The Park at Arles with the Entrance Seen Through the Trees as the inspiration for the novel’s premise. The painting is presumed to have been destroyed during World War II, but Hicks hopes that missing van Gogh pieces may one day resurface. Ironically, Hicks mentions the 2014 discovery of a van Gogh painting in Spain that has since been determined to be a fake. In contrast, a self-portrait of van Gogh that has been disputed since 1970 was confirmed authentic in 2020 by the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands.

Like detective work, art authentications require layers of sleuthing to find out what is genuine and what is fraudulent. In The Van Gogh Deception, Hicks’s combination of the detective genre with real-world methodologies for authenticating art provides a narrative of suspense and a lesson in art history.