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 $US82.5 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 $US300 million ($482 million), or more, experts say.

Portrait of Dr Gachet was prominently displayed for much of the 20th century at the Städel 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 has become one of the art world’s greatest mysteries.

Curators putting together van Gogh shows have thrown up their hands at finding it. The Städel 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 Gachet was acquired by an Austrian financier who soon found that he too could not afford to keep it.

In 1998, the van Gogh was sold privately to an undisclosed party. The trail has run cold since.

At least publicly.

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

For months, reporters for The New York Times have sought out the small group of people involved in the 1998 sale and the larger corps of experts who track such purchases. Their effort to find the Gachet – a journey taken over the years by many others – stretched from the auction houses and galleries of New York to a storybook Swiss villa alongside Lake Lugano.

Many experts had no clue what had happened to the painting. Four art world insiders said they suspect the painting is held by a private, very rich European family. All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public?

The question has grown more relevant as it becomes clearer that most museums can no longer outbid billionaire collectors for the greatest works of art. Few paintings make that point plainer than Gachet’s portrait, a piece long on public display that has now vanished into someone’s private home or a climate-controlled warehouse.

A portrait of a doctor and melancholia

Anyone looking to track the history and whereabouts of the Gachet would do well to start in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village outside Paris. When van Gogh stepped off the train there, on May 20, 1890, the rustic landscape and thatched-roof houses had already become a magnet for artists of the day. The deeply troubled artist, 37, would kill himself only weeks later. But he was about to enter one of his most productive periods during which he painted Wheat Field With Crows and The Church at Auvers.

Loading

That same day, he met with Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a doctor who had studied nervous disorders. The two shared a love of art. Van Gogh was soon painting still lifes in the doctor’s garden – and the doctor’s portrait.

Van Gogh gave a second version of the painting to Gachet. It is on display at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

“To me, it reveals Vincent’s strong humanistic impulse and his capacity for love,” said Gary Tinterow, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was the Met’s curator of 19th-century European paintings in 1990 when the portrait was taken off the wall to be auctioned.

After van Gogh’s suicide, the painting passed to his brother Theo, then to Theo’s wife, Johanna, who sold it in 1897 for 300 francs (about $US58 at the time). By 1904, it was in the hands of a German count, who had paid roughly $US400 for it.

In 1911, the Städel acquired the portrait and placed it alongside greats like Albrecht Dürer. The Gachet soon ranked among the museum’s most prized works.

The Nazis took power in the 1930s and began confiscating the art they despised. By the end of 1937 it had been taken and sent to Berlin.

An art agent for Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering sold the Gachet to Franz Koenigs, a German banker living in Amsterdam. Its next owner, a German-Jewish banker, Siegfried Kramarsky, brought the portrait to New York when he emigrated, and for decades, on and off, the painting was displayed at the Met, typically in the summers when the Kramarskys were away, Tinterow recalled. In 1984, it was sent to the Met on full-time “indefinite loan”.

When the Kramarskys sold the Gachet in 1990, the winning bidder was Ryoei Saito, the honorary chair of Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Co. His criminal troubles would include a charge that he had paid a bribe to redistrict forestry land for, among other things, the “Vincent Golf Club”. When those troubles escalated, his Gachet and other art passed to a creditor, the Fuji Bank.

It sold the painting in 1997 to Wolfgang Flöttl, an Austrian financier.

When Flöttl’s own finances suffered, the Gachet was sold again, privately, in a transaction arranged through Sotheby’s. Neither the price nor the buyer was publicly disclosed, and the Gachet simply vanished from the art world.

“It is part of history, but it is also part of our lives now, and not knowing where it is is unbearable,” said Wouter van der Veen, a van Gogh scholar working to restore Gachet’s home in France.

The keepers of secrets

Over the years, there has been all sorts of speculation about who holds the Gachet.

Guido Barilla, the chair of the eponymous pasta company, was identified as a likely candidate. But a German journalist, Johannes Nichelmann, disputed that in a 2019 podcast on the painting commissioned by the Städel. In the podcast, David Nash, who was Flöttl’s art dealer and former head of impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, told Nichelmann that the buyer of the Gachet was an Italian who lived in Switzerland. He did not name him.

A German art reporter, Stefan Koldehoff, in 2019 wrote that at Sotheby’s the current owner was known as “The Lugano Man”.

It’s no surprise that people at Sotheby’s would know, or think they know, who holds the Gachet. For one thing, the auction house sold the work. For another, it’s in a business that relies on tracking, and keeping secret, the identity of owners so that when death, divorce or other events lead to a sale, your company has the inside track.

The people who say they think they know who owns the Gachet are this sort of art world insider – not infallible but exceptionally well-informed. Four of them said they believe it was bought by an Italian family, the Invernizzis, who have taken to living in Switzerland.

The Invernizzi money is a legacy of their involvement in the production and sale of cheese manufactured by Galbani, a company that three Invernizzi brothers – Ermenegildo, Achille and Rinaldo – took over in the 1920s.

The Invernizzi stake in Galbani was obscured by holding companies in 1989, when the cheese manufacturer was sold for $1.6 billion. At that time, Antonio Invernizzi, a son to Rinaldo, was on the company’s board.

Loading

Antonio Invernizzi, who died some years ago, was still the patriarch in 1998 when the art world insiders say they believe the family purchased the van Gogh masterpiece. Neither he nor the Invernizzi name is mentioned in a new documentary about the painting by Nichelmann, who created the 2019 podcast. But the film shows the lake and refers to the rumoured owner of the Gachet as being a Lugano family who made billions in the food industry. It also says the family denied owning it.

Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet, said he does not know who bought it in 1998. But he offered a note of caution about deciding that the mystery had been solved.

“Several people have come and sat here over the years,” he said, during an interview in the New York gallery where he is a director, “and told me they know where it is, and I believe they were wrong.”

Findlay said that, actually, he had heard that the Gachet had likely moved on to another owner since 1998. Asked to elaborate, he declined.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.