Two months after the stock market crash of 1929, an American Gold Rush heiress named Eila Haggin McKee purchased a Paul Gauguin still life called “Flowers and Fruit” (c. 1889) from the Reinhardt Galleries in New York City for $5,000. A decade later, McKee gave the painting to the Haggin Museum, a fledgling new museum in Stockton, California that she helped found, and where it has remained on display ever since. But for nearly 90 years, the art world believed the painting to be lost. When it was “rediscovered” in 2018, the Gauguin committee of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute decided to remove the work from its latest version of the artist’s catalogue raisonné. “Flowers and Fruit” was no longer an authentic Gauguin, at least in the opinion of the institute. 

How did a painting that was once coveted by museum directors and collectors alike simply disappear? And how can a work of art suddenly be deemed inauthentic, after more than a century of authenticity? This is the subject of The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market by Stephanie Brown.

The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin is many things at once. It’s an art detective mystery, a behind-the-scenes look at provenance research, a psychological analysis of Paul Gauguin, and a critical commentary on the art market. It is also a case study of what can go wrong from the minute a painting leaves an artist’s hands. Brown takes the reader from the rocky seaside coast of Brittany, France to the hallowed halls of Paris’s most esteemed art auction houses, the galleries of New Bond Street in London and Fifth Avenue in New York City, and finally, a little-known museum in northern California, uncovering, in her words,  a “complex, layered story” with “unexpected connections and surprising gaps.” 

In the book, Brown provides one definition of provenance: the “chain of transfer of ownership and possession” of a work of art. By this definition, there are some critical issues to the provenance of “Flowers and Fruit”  that originate from Gauguin himself, whom Brown describes as a wandering soul who lived a “peripatetic life” full of “fractured relationships.” Gauguin himself often did not know exactly where his paintings were. As the artist was not commercially successful in his lifetime, there was no reason for anyone to keep detailed accounts of his paintings. His agent, the renowned dealer Ambroise Vollard, kept “famously vague and inconsistent” records, according to Brown. And finally, the relationships between art dealers in the early 20th century was complex, opaque, and international, allowing for art to be purchased and moved under the radar. This combination of unfortunate factors sowed the seeds of doubt nearly 130 years after “Flowers and Fruit” was created. 

The painting features two vases, one blue and one dark pink, with eight pieces of fruit and floral blue wallpaper in the background. According to the Wildenstein Institute’s 1964 catalogue raisonné, which deemed the painting authentic but noted it as “disparu,” or “missing,” it was likely painted in 1889 at an inn on the coast of Brittany. Scientific analysis so far has confirmed that the painting does indeed date from that time period. 

It is not, however, a painting that screams “Gauguin.” Brown calls it “ordinary.”  Still life paintings only make up 15 percent of the artist’s oeuvre, and “Flowers and Fruit” does not resemble any of his others. Nor does it seem to reflect a particular location, which his work often does. 

But, as Brown notes, the painting does resemble Paul Cézanne’s “Still Life with Fruit Dish” (1879–80), which Gauguin owned. And he often lost track of artwork. He would stash paintings with friends and acquaintances between travels around France and long stays in Tahiti. Often, he would fall out with them; sometimes, they would refuse to return his artwork. And he had no family life to speak of, having abandoned his wife and family shortly after the French stock market crash of 1882. 

“Flowers and Fruit” was dedicated to “à l’ami Roy” — “the friend Roy” — per the words written above Gauguin’s signature on the painting. One of Brown’s first quests was to track down who exactly “Roy” was. Through what she describes as a “meticulous culling of source materials,” Brown discovered that Louis Roy was a fledgling artist and high school drawing teacher who had collaborated with Gauguin on a series of woodcut prints. Gauguin once made a portrait of him, and he owned numerous Gauguin paintings before he sold half a dozen of them to Vollard shortly after the artist’s death. Two years after Roy died, his wife sold two more. None of these, however, were “Flowers and Fruit.”

By the early 1920s, interest in Gauguin had increased exponentially. Major museums, including the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, added the artist’s work to their collections. In 1923, “Flowers and Fruit” came up for auction at the Hôtel Drouot, a respected auction house in Paris, consigned as one of several Gauguins said to come from the Louis Roy collection. At that point, the painting was considered a “signature” work of Gauguin; the renowned French actor Sacha Guitry purchased the painting for 14,000 francs — around the equivalent of around $10,000 today, according to some conversions. Six years later, Guitry put the painting back up for auction at the same auction house, where an amateur collector named Max Kaganovitch, bidding on behalf of gallery owner Étienne Bignou, bought it for 42,700 francs, or around $20,000 today. From there, it traveled to London, where Bob McKee, Eila’s husband, saw it in a gallery window. When it traveled to the Reinhardt Gallery in New York City later that year, the McKees purchased it. 

In 1939, the McKees donated the painting to the Haggin Museum, located 80 miles east of San Francisco. It was a museum specialized in local history, rather than art. There were no art historians who could write a catalog. It had no connections to the greater art community, and there is no record of them working with external art experts. This is how the painting disappeared from the art world — until 2018, when Brown reached out to the Wildenstein Institute to let them know where the painting was, and sent them her research. The institute inspected the painting and decided not to include it in its new edition of Gauguin’s catalogue raisonné, but did not give any reason why. 

“Flowers and Fruit” was once the pride of the Haggin Museum. The painting was emblazoned on mugs, coasters, and postcards in the gift shop. Due to the uncertainty of the painting’s provenance, however, the museum removed the painting from public view in 2018 and hung it in a private office. Next month, however, it will return to the museum galleries as part of a special exhibition delving into the history and provenance of the painting. It will be hung side-by-side with another Gauguin still life, “Still Life with Quimper Pitcher” (1889), on loan from the BAMPFA collection at the University of California Berkeley. 

Brown set out to determine if “Flowers and Fruit” was authentic. She does not find a definitive answer, but her research leads her to many other important questions: Who gets to decide what is authentic or not? What is the definition of “authenticity”? Does the location of where a piece of art ends up — a fine art museum, a renowned private collector, or a local historical museum — impact the painting’s legitimacy? What inherent biases exist within provenance research? What groups of people or types of artists are privileged in this research? Does the practice account for human nature and how history unfolds, which is often messy, unpredictable, and unclear?

According to Brown, the story of the painting’s fluctuating authenticity is more a “story about cultural power and identity, and the way that the art world assigns value.” Being left off a catalogue raisonné, Brown writes, “does not necessarily confirm or deny the authenticity of a work of art.” She adds, “Gauguin specialists do not always agree on the authenticity of a particular work.” Two more still life paintings by the artist, for instance, were removed from the latest update to the Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné in July 2024, including one housed in the Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen purchased from the same 1923 auction as “Flowers and Fruit,” and one from the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. Additional scientific testing, Brown adds, could yield more answers. Ultimately, the convoluted history of “Flowers and Fruit” is still being written. 

The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market (2024) by Stephanie Brown, published by Rowman & Littlefield, is available for purchase online and in bookstores.