Stephanie Brown57. Signatures and attributionsTo greet the New Year we have a visual game to play that takes us from the typeface of Twitter to the painterly loops of Paul Gauguin....
Stephanie Brown42. Who tells your storyWe'll let Gauguin get on with it in Pont Aven and shift our attention today to a young woman in Amsterdam who, while Gauguin was making...
Stephanie Brown37. Frames On the first day in nearly a month in which I have been able to carve out space for Flowers and Fruit, the Gallica BnF website is...
Stephanie Brown34. Behind the curtainI learned something last Thursday that merits an interruption. Vincent will continue to be sad and desperate, and Gauguin will continue...
Stephanie Brown24. The evidence of the feetOn Friday December 13, 1889, Gauguin wrote a long catching-up letter to van Gogh. Van Gogh was convalescing in the asylum at Saint-Rémy...
Stephanie Brown23. Le roy et la royneIn 1938, a man named Jean-Albert Schmit donated a scrapbook of letters, photographs, and sketches to the Louvre. The oblong album was...
Stephanie Brown22. To the manor bornIf you tap at the archives for long enough, a few cracks start to show. Follow the cracks and you can begin to pick off the layers...
Stephanie Brown21. Still LifesThough there's a question as to whether Fruit in a Bowl was the still life Gauguin showed at the 8th Impressionist Exhibition, there's no...
Stephanie Brown19. Not a nice manWhen I was growing up in North Carolina, the worst thing that my grandmother could say about someone was that he was not a nice man. My...
Stephanie Brown14. 1889: The Volpini Exhibition Connecting Louis Roy to Paul Gauguin was one of my first tasks. Roy was difficult to track down, but one connection was easy to find: ...
Stephanie Brown11. 1929: How to make a painting disappearIn June 1929, the art dealer Paul Reinhardt sailed from New York to Southampton, England, on the White Star Line’s “Majestic.” Reinhardt...
Stephanie BrownWelcome: Start Here.This blog is a mystery, a travelogue across time and place, and a memoir about life and art, museums and research.
Stephanie Brown10. In which the Getty rearranges its storageLast week the Parisian daily Le Figaro announced that the Getty Museum had downgraded a sculpture previously attributed to Paul Gauguin...
Stephanie Brown7. 2016: The Chase BeginsSo here I was with a painting by an important post-Impressionist artist that no one in the museum world outside of Stockton, CA, had...
Stephanie Brown6. And speaking of reattributions...There's been a painting newly re-attributed to Van Gogh this week. This self-portrait that lives in the National Gallery in Oslo has...
Stephanie Brown5. The ProvenanceOn my first visit to the Haggin Museum, in January 2016, I saw Flowers and Fruit: a fairly traditional still life of a few bumpy apples...
Stephanie Brown4. Authenticity & ReattributionsPoppies got my attention because the circumstances—the regional museum, the work questioned by experts—were so similar to Flowers and...
Stephanie Brown3. Authenticity: A Painting Moves UpstairsA disputed Van Gogh is authenticated by experts.
Stephanie Brown2. 2016, 1923: The MysteryOne of those still lifes travels the world today as an authentic painting by Paul Gauguin. One hangs in
Stephanie Brown1. In which we discuss the digital worldIf I were not able to access archives online as much as I can...