Stephanie Brown
24. The evidence of the feet
On Friday December 13, 1889, Gauguin wrote a long catching-up letter to van Gogh. Van Gogh was convalescing in the asylum at Saint-Rémy...
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Stephanie Brown
23. Le roy et la royne
In 1938, a man named Jean-Albert Schmit donated a scrapbook of letters, photographs, and sketches to the Louvre. The oblong album was...
Stephanie Brown
22. To the manor born
If 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 Brown
21. Still Lifes
Though 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 Brown
20. "Tall, dark, rather handsome"
It may seem that there is nothing new under the sun. And then there's a portrait that hasn't been seen before...
Stephanie Brown
19. Not a nice man
When 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 Brown
18. Summer 1886
Clovis Gauguin was seven years old the summer that his father discovered Brittany.
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17. Introducing Pont-Aven
By 1879, a train ran once a day from Paris to Finistère, Land's End, at the eastern edge of Brittany...
Stephanie Brown
16. The Villa Brune
Two men connected by two circumstances: their addresses and paintings by Gauguin. Not just any paintings, either...
Stephanie Brown
14. 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 Brown
12. April 14, 1923: Tableaux, pastels & dessins
Catalogue des Tableaux modernes, Hôtel Drouot, 14 Avril 1923. Institut national de l'histoire de l'art, Paris, VP 1923/254 I knew from...
Stephanie Brown
15. During a pandemic
Georges Seurat, Le Cirque, 1891 We are now at day 47 of sheltering at home. We're not in quarantine, technically, because none of us are...
Stephanie Brown
11. 1929: How to make a painting disappear
In June 1929, the art dealer Paul Reinhardt sailed from New York to Southampton, England, on the White Star Line’s “Majestic.” Reinhardt...
Stephanie Brown
13. "No known provenance prior to its appearance at auction..."
Eustache Le Sueur, The Rape of Tamar, about 1640 The Metropolitan Museum of Art This morning's New York Times features an article titled...
Stephanie Brown
Welcome: Start Here.
This blog is a mystery, a travelogue across time and place, and a memoir about life and art, museums and research.
Stephanie Brown
9. 1885: From the provinces to Paris
Louis Georges Eléonor Roy was born in Poligny, in the foothills of the Alps, on July 23, 1862. His father, Jean-Eléonor, was 42; his...
Stephanie Brown
8. 1964: Looking for Louis Roy
Meanwhile, back in Stockton, I began studying the provenance for Flowers and Fruit that the Wildensteins had put together in 1964. I...
Stephanie Brown
10. In which the Getty rearranges its storage
Last week the Parisian daily Le Figaro announced that the Getty Museum had downgraded a sculpture previously attributed to Paul Gauguin...
Stephanie Brown
7. 2016: The Chase Begins
So 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 Brown
6. 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...
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