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

A globetrotting Gold Rush heiress. An awkward Paris schoolmaster. A celebrated French actor. And a museum of history and art in California’s Central Valley. What do they have in common? They are all connected by an oil painting, a still life called Flowers 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 Fruit traveled 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 Museum’s 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?

Is Flowers and Fruit a 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 painting--and explores what we mean by authenticity and who gets to define it.

Now undergoing technical examination as a result of Dr. Brown’s findings, Flowers and Fruit has embarked on a new chapter of its life. If the painting is authentic, it will be the most valuable painting in the Haggin’s collection--and one of the most important paintings in California. And if the painting is a forgery, who was the forger?

Stephanie Brown is program coordinator and senior lecturer in Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Museum Studies. Brown has spent twenty years in the museum field as an archivist, curator of material culture, museum director, consultant, and professor. She is a past co-chair of the American Alliance of Museum’s Museum Studies Network. She has taught and lectured about museums, museum collections, and art history at the Haggin Museum, Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens, Long Island University, Santa Clara University, Stanford University, and the University of San Francisco.