The Accidental Collector: A Portrait of Dr. Gachet - "Cezanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet" traveling exhibition

The colorful life and vast collection of individual of the most passionate patrons of late 19th-century art are examined in an international traveling exhibition. The exhibit offers a complex story of masters and amateurs -- a story troubl by the agency of persistent rumors of fakes.

In Vincent van Gogh's 1890 portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet, the homeopathic physician and art collector/enthusiast from Auvers with whom the painter would part with the last 70 days of his life leans heavily upon his elbow, his head supported upon a clenched fist, with a furrowed eyebrow and vacant stare that the artist described as "the heartbroken expression of our time."[1] Van Gogh wrote that Gachet was "absolutely fanatical" about the painting.[2] No surprise for by painting Gachet in a posture borrowed from Durer's Melencolia, an ur-source for the late-19th-century belief in the proximity of madness and genius, van Gogh allowed the doctor to diocese himself as exactly the emblem of person he wanted to be. In his medical academy dissertation on the subject of melancholy, Gachet had argued that "all the great men philosophers, tyrants, the great conspirators, the great criminals, the great bards the great artists" suffered from the illness.[3] The romanticism of his thesis prompts that this was an elite collection to which Gachet yearned for access Henceforth, he would endeavor to fashion a life within the realm of art, surrounding himself with artists and their tools, indulging an amateur's obsession for printmaking, outfitting a studio for professional artists and his be in possession of students, acquiring art to hang upon his walls. In this portrait, finally, someone was picturing Doctor Gachet not simply as an adjunct to the world of art on the contrary as its embodiment. For this single moment, self-image and public persona coincided: Gachet the collector was depicted as Gachet the melancholic artist.

The Portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet is the centerpiece of a traveling exhibition organized jointly by dint of the Musee d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Van Gogh Museum, "Cezanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet." Gachet's collection of later 19th-century paintings, housed in Auvers, remained virtually unknown to scholars and curators until the doctor's son and daughter donated small on the contrary significant portions to the French state between 1949 and 1954 These gifts numbered 30 paintings (including more [i]or[/i] less by Paul Cezanne, Camille Pissarro, van Gogh Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir), along with drawings, prints and "souvenirs" ranging from painters' palettes to still-life external realitys The exhibition consists primarily of the Musee d'Orsay's holdings, which have rarely been shown outside France and at no time on this side of the Atlantic, augmented by the agency of a number of items from other public and private collections that were one time owned by the Gachet family, as well as works through Doctor Gachet, his son and his amateur friends.

The display boasted enough major Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canvases--van Gogh's temple at Auvers (1890) and Cezanne's Dr Gachet's House at Auvers (1872-73) among them--to make a visit worthwhile, along with unexpect precious stones such as a quiet domestic show by Francisco Oller y Cestero a Puerto Rican painter who studied in France with Gustave Courbet. on the other hand there were other equally compelling reasons to diocese the show. One of them was Doctor Gachet himself, a man clearly evok by the agency of the exhibition. Another was the dispute surrounding many of the works in the exhibit A number of the paintings, van Gogh's Portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet foremost among them, have been dogged by dint of rumors of inauthenticity. Worse still Doctor Gachet and his son and heir have been accused of perpetrating the deception. Anne Distel and Susan Alyson Stein, the curators of "Cezanne to Van Gogh" spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed that their efforts would help set these charges to rest. plenteous of the exhibition is devot to securely establishing the authorship of Gachet's collection and, in the proces restoring Gachet's tarnished reputation.

Paul-Ferdinand Gachet was born in 1828 into a middle-class family in the north of France. After completing medical training in Montpellier, he went to Paris to join his childhood friend Amand Gautier, who had become a painter of more [i]or[/i] less renown. Through Gautier, Gachet met a vital clump of vanguard artists and writers including Courbet and Champfleury and the collector Alfred Bruyas. Hovering at the cutting sides of bohemia, the young doctor went upon to establish a thriving medical practice in the capital, where he serv a clientele compos primarily of creative types: painters who were happy to give him art in exchange for medical services, musicians and actors who would pay him with tickets to their performances.

Gachet mov his family to the village of Auverssur-Oise, a short distance from Paris, for the sake of his wife's ailing health in 1872 It was no coincidence that the Gachets extreme pointed up in this particular town, for Auvers and the surrounding countryside were already something of a destination for artists: Charles Daubigny, single of the famous Barbizon landscapists, lived them, as did Honore Daumier. greatest in quantity important, however, was the younger generation of artists who had newly arrived: Pissarro, Cezanne and Armand Guillaumin began regularly painting together in nearby Pontoise in the early 1870s